Jump to Contents. UPDATED 2015 August 20
Click What
you can expect if you are as good as (or better than) I was.
(lr_for_grasshoppers,
written by an intelligent LR learner.)
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
Faithfully Presented By
L-R:
“LISTENING-reading” system – learning foreign
languages on your own.
Ad maiorem 愛子さま gloriam, pro
publico bono, written and compiled by a non-native speaker of Plain Broken
English, so bear, or should I say bare, with me.
The latest version
here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/.
This mirror automatically updates every week from the
users.bestweb.net site:
http://rawtoast.eurybia.feralhosting.com/users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/
Anything written by
myself is © 1990–2013 Phi-Staszek aYa
(and © LG Maluszka Volte).
All Rights Reserved.
I’m against any
commercial use of anything by my humble self. You can repost this document
anywhere you feel like it.
There’s only one rule to rule them all:
A handful of rice and a little bit of
tenderness.
Here you are:
The rule of thumb: if you read the
explanations below (it’s the most important post, you
can safely ignore the rest), experiment a little bit, and the advantages are
not immediately obvious, L-R is not
for you.
What really matters happens in your
head, anyway. So how good/bad/fast/slow your progress will be has little to do
with any methods or lack thereof.
L-R is meant for hard-core learners
– Awe
Riders.
(See
What you can expect if you are as good as (or
better than) I was.)
I don't intend to convince anybody
to learn my way or any way at all. I only share my experience. And resources –
I’ve posted plenty of parallel texts and other language learning materials in a
variety of languages. Learners of Japanese might find some resources
particularly useful.
It is a loose collection of posts I
have written over the years (I publicly mentioned L-R in Russian on a Russian
language forum in 2002), they are in no way exhaustive (they can be exhausting,
though) nor systematic in any way, with plenty of unavoidable repetitions. You
can’t expect anything too coherent from language fora, their nature is
frivolous and chatty. The passages are taken out of context, from larger
threads, but it’s usually clear what they refer to. I added some hyperlinks.
Tried to proofread everything, but it took too much time, so don’t blame me. A
number of posts are no longer on line.
Some posts are by people who tried
to incorporate L-R into their own learning or voiced their OPINIONS.
The rest is up to you.
More systematically about L-R in
Polish – written in the beginning of the nineties for an extremely smart girl
in her early teens:
If you don't know Polish, hak ci w
smak. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be put at an equal disadvantage: I've
learned English, you learn Polish.
Knowledge is holographic (a system –
a set of interdependent elements/subsystems), writing about it is linear – step
by step. Hence the necessity to read everything from the beginning to the end a
few times to make the system clearly visible.
aYa
Warning:
English is not my cup of tea at all.
But somehow I manage to drink it now and Zen.
I don’t believe in learning a little
bit every day. I believe in learning a huge bit every minute.
Plenty of people can drive a car. L-R is Formula One.
Now you know what to expect.
Lesson one, find your own way by
yourself.
Lesson two, shooting is a straight
line.
(Gun Crazy Beyond The Law)
Disclaimer:
Of course, it's none of my business
how you waste your own time, so let me waste my own time my own way.
I don't believe in any methods, I
believe in common sense – my common sense is rather uncommon, though.
I always look for a system, I try to
find all interdependent elements in a given situation, and then charge at them
accordingly. ASSAULT
My only rule is: there are no
rule(r)s.
aYa
‘LISTENING-Reading’ in a teeny-weeny
nutshell
If you want to learn a language
quickly you’ll need
Why I think the Three Steps are
useful
ASSAULT = massive exposure in a
short period of time
The key to L-R is sensory memory,
In praise of number 6 (and 9 if you
look close enough).
What you can expect if you are as
good as (or better than) I was.
Learn your own language properly
Once upon a time there was a prince
who wanted to marry a princess.
Skills: touch typing, kanji,
mnemonics, and language learning
Near native reading skills, but basic
listening skills?
The most difficult language in the
world.
The best qualities a teacher can
have?
Why do people lie about being
fluent?
Japanese L-R – An inexperienced
learner – A case study
The trouble with language textbooks
Thinking – the most underrated
language skill
The same novel in every language
Audiobooks – readers/narrators
What I would NEVER do and some
people do
‘Exposure comes before knowledge, not after’ (by doviende)
To know a language or its culture
Simple and useful, to practise every
day
Complete gratis legal LR material
Examples of literary texts for zero
beginners
Science is not about citations,
fame, authority
Men are born ignorant, not stupid.
L-R roundup thread by LG Maluszka
Volte
Japanese (plus some Mandarin and
Korean)
Charlmartell (= leserables) My last
post 2009 08 02
mjcdchess (The essence, the soul,
the spirit of L-R – aYa)
For anyone interested in
multilingual language learning.
Some links about nothing in
particular
L-R is
simply beautiful and beautifully simple.
|
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, or, to put it bluntly, LISTEN (L2) and read (L1). (And use your
second favourite organ – your head.)
(L1 = your mother
tongue, L2 = the language you’re learning)
LOVE + ‘LISTENING-Reading’
(incubation period and then natural listening) + PRONUNCIATION
+ Assault = reading + speaking + writing.
Use LONG novels right from the outset. If the languages are different the
first three to five hours should be translated word for
word. If they are related (or you already know quite a bit about L2), it is
not necessary.
L-R
is meant for AWE riders – I’m sure I’m not the
only one. (flow)
I mean, basically, there are only
two skills to master: listening comprehension and pronunciation. Usually
completely ignored, I must add. The rest (reading, speaking, writing) follows almost naturally with just tiny
little bits of additional efforts. Yes, and that’s true even – or particularly
so – for languages with ‘whimsical’ script (Chinese, Japanese L-R).
Learning a language HAPPENS on its own. All you need is personally
relevant massive exposure. And... you must pay lovingly tender attention to what’s
happening before your ears and eyes. And in your soul
– love, joy, and soul shattering awe should be your guides.
If you try
to ‘conquer’ or ‘annihilate’ (= memorize) a language, it will rebel – your own
brain doesn’t like to be raped and turned into a slave.
Language
is a system of interdependent elements: sounds (phonemes, tones, pitch accent,
stress, rhythm, intonation), words (combinations of sounds that carry meaning),
phrases and sentences (combinations of words), and texts (spoken and written,
combinations of all the above). Only TEXTS carry
personally relevant real life meanings and EMOTIONS.
What you can expect if you are as good as
(or better than) I was.
Being intelligent enough is not
enough – you must be pretty enough.
aYa
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 must ENJOY (AWE) the text you're
going to listen to.
Texts for beginners should be long –
the longer the better, up to fifty hours or even more (e.g. Anna Karenina, War and
Peace, Catch-22, À la recherche du temps perdu, A History of Western Philosophy, Europe:
A History or some pulp-fiction – The Lord of the Ring, Harry
Potter).
(Some books
I used.)
The translation:
a) interlinear,
word for word (3 to 5 hours of audio) (for beginners)
b) literary, but following the
original text as closely as possible
The original text and the literary
translation should be placed in parallel vertical
columns side by side.
Then you can check almost instantly
whether you understand or not.
The order ought to be EXACTLY as
follows:
What you do:
1. you read the translation
because you only remember well what
you understand and what you feel is "yours" psychologically
2. you listen to the recording and
look at the written text at the same time,
because the flow of speech has no
boundaries between words and the written text does, you will be able to separate
each word in the speech flow
and you will get used to the speed
of talking of native speakers – at first it seems incredibly fast
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 Step 1 and 2. (It takes some training, but
after a while it becomes second nature.) (See ‘The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R’ as well.)
4. now you can concentrate on
SPEAKING: you repeat after the recording (and recite),
you do it as many times as necessary to become fluent
Of course, first you have to know
how to pronounce the sounds of the language you’re learning. How to teach
yourself the correct PRONUNCIATION is a different
matter, here I will only mention the importance of it.
(5.) you translate the text from
your own language into the language you’re learning, no need to translate
everything, of course
you can do the translation both
orally and in writing, that’s why the written texts should be placed in
vertical columns side by side: you can cover one side and check using the other
one.
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.
© Ptaszek-Phi-Staszek aYa
No, L-R is NOT watching subtitled movies.
No, L-R is NOT Assimil and suchlike.
No, L-R is NOT just a harmless
practical joke of mine – it WORKS.
aYa
Of course, it’s just an outline, not
the Bible, some food for thought, the rest depends on the learner, it is not a
recipe for a happy marriage. Experiment and see what happens.
There are variations: you can skip
Step 1 and/or Step 2 and go straight to Step 3. Or you can combine Step 1 and
Step 2 and ignore Step 3. Or you can do Step 3 with an occasional look at the
L2 text – it’s possible if you have vertical parallel texts with matching small
cells and you are a fast enough L1 reader. If you
only have an L2 audio recording and L1 text (no L2 text), you could try Step 3
straight away – you never know, it might work.
Plenty depends on what you already
know, what tools you have, and how good an L1 reader/learner you are.
If you have a mouse-over pop-up
dictionary (Lingvo 12), you can use it, too. (You need e-texts, of course.)
A Russian friend of mine, who only
cared about reading novels (not interested in listening comprehension or
speaking at all), did L1 listening while L2 reading. She used computer
generated voices! Out of curiosity, I tried it, too – you learn pretty fast to
ignore the voices, you only concentrate on the meaning.
I also noticed, while copying
cassettes with double speed, that if you have already listened to an L2
recording and understand it, you will be able to understand the accelerated
version. It made me laugh. Later, I read somewhere that LG Maluszka Volte did
it on purpose. People’s inventiveness seems to be unlimited.
STEP 2 (this time: Listen to L1 and
look at L1) can be done in L1 to teach small
children (even babies) to read. See Glenn
Doman, Janet Doman – How To Teach Your Baby To Read (Silent Revolution). Here’s
the book in Polish.
It also
marvelously works for school drop-outs who cannot read or can hardly read or
have forgotten how to read.
In Ancient
Israel children as small as two were taught how to read that way by their
parents.
aYa
To put it in a nutshell:
Learning a language is all about
EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text you're able to understand in a unit of time
(a minute multiplied by hours and days).
When you start at the beginner's
level your exposure is almost none.
It does NOT matter whether you
understand each single word, in the beginning concentrate on sentences. The
more of them you will hear and see at the same time, the more exposure you will
get. Let your brain do the rest.
The layout of the texts to learn is
very important.
Sensory memories – visual (iconic)
and auditory (echoic) – are very short and disappear within a second, so you
get lost when you have to look for words, they should CONSTANTLY be within your
eyes’ and ears’ reach.
If you want to maximize your
EXPOSURE:
Use meaningful texts (not words,
short sentences).
Use LONG texts with AUDIO.
By texts I mean TEXTS (a story, a
joke, a newspaper article, a poem, a novel), not individual words or sentences
or boring textbooks dialogues about nothing.
Don't try to speak (or write) too
soon, it is much better to listen to more texts instead, listening
comprehension should be the most important goal.
I concentrate on the meaning, I do
not try to learn a particular language, what I am interested in is the story,
not the language.
And don't do any tests, it is a
complete waste of time and a source of appalling number of mistakes. Tests are
good for teachers and publishers, not for learners.
Sooner or later you will feel you're
ready to speak or write, it will come naturally, and it will be easy.
I’ve NEVER learned how to write English,
and I am able to put across almost anything I want, (making hell of a lot of
mistakes, but who cares as long as the meaning is clear). You may not believe
it, but I haven’t written anything in English for three years, and still I can
manage.
ONE thing at a time.
Remember "The Last
Samurai": "Too many minds: mind the sword, mind the people watch. No
mind."
PS
As to my English. I'm not a native
speaker. I am aware I might sometimes sound too abrupt or patronizing. If so,
please forgive me, it was not my intention.
Be happy, go lucky.
Miss Hopper
aYa
Why I think the Three Steps
are useful
STEP 1
You read the story to make it
“yours” psychologically.
I added: you must be passionately in
love with the text you’re going to study.
Imagine you’re a biologist and
you’ve been crossing frogs with snails and cloning sheep since you were in
cradle – it’s your life, you know hell of a lot about it, it makes you happy
and you can’t imagine your life without it. One day you discover there’s a
wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into lions. Unfortunately it’s
in the clitty-titty language, and you don’t know it. So you decide to learn the
wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang yourself.
Notice two points:
you know almost everything about the
subject and you’re in love with it.
The texts in clitty-titty will be self-explanatory and highly enjoyable, you
won’t get tired (on the contrary, you’ll get happier and happier) and you’ll
guess the meaning of at least half of the sentences in clitty-titty.
And now another real life example:
La principessa, a teenage girl, is in love with Harry Potter, she’s been
reading the books time and again and knows them by heart. She decides to become
a witch herself: to go to Hoggwart, she must learn English in a week to prove
she’s worthy.
No problem, she has a magic wand:
audiobooks of her prince (Harry Potter), but, unfortunately she has no English
texts.
She listens to the books time and
again, after a few times she can understand every single word.
Notice two points:
Harry Potter is her life, and the
texts in English are self-explanatory.
I’m sure you remember my own
example: Kafka and Nabokov.
You might as well remember I say you
can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary,
though they might be useful.
STEP 2
You listen to the text in LSD2 and
look at the written text in LSD2.
If you’ve ever tried to listen to
native speakers of any language, you must have noticed that at first you do not
know which groups of sounds form words and that they (speakers, not words)
speak as if they were machine guns.
The aim of STEP 2 is to cure these
two small drawbacks, and at the same time to get some exposure to meaning,
sounds, rhythm, intonation in LSD2.
Whether you should go from the
beginning to the end depends on two things:
1. how much you understand
2. if you already can recognize the
boundaries between words and the speed is no longer frightening.
If you understand quite a lot (being
a free person, you yourself must decide how much is enough for you), you’d
better go to the end.
If you don’t understand anything new
after the first ten to twenty pages but you can follow the written text easily
and can spot the boundaries in the flow of speech, you’d better stop and go to
STEP 3. If the speed is still frightening you go on until it stops being so.
You might as well remember I say you
can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary,
though they might be useful.
((LSD1 = L1, a joke of mine, if you didn’t guess))
STEP 3
You’re reading LSD1 and listening to
LSD2.
If you’re a fast enough reader you
can read much faster than people speak, so you’re able to know IN ADVANCE the
meaning of what you’re going to listen to, and to be in a position to guess at
least some meaning (with a good translation almost everything) of what you’re
listening to.
How difficult the text for
“listening-reading” should be depends entirely on you, you might start with
something relatively simple.
Because of the IDIOLECT of the author the
first 10-20 pages might be a nightmare for some, but then it’s getting easier
and easier, the longer the text the easier it becomes, but it’s still the same IDIOLECT,
variation after variation on the same theme, more and more celestial music.
If you’re not capable of doing it
without stopping the tape (audio file, tempora
mutantur, there are no tapes any longer), you might decide to read a page
(or a paragraph) and listen to the passage once or twice and go on.
The aim of STEP 3 is obvious:
MEANINGFUL EXPOSURE, INPUT, LISTENING COMPREHENSION.
And ultimately: NATURAL LISTENING – understanding completely new texts
without any crutches, you only rely on your ears and what you already know. It
basically means you are able to understand NEW recorded texts (usually slightly
simpler than the ones you have “listened-read”) without using any written
texts, neither the original nor a translation and without having read them in
L1 before.
I might add here: garbage in,
garbage out.
When you’ve come to the stage of
‘natural listening’ to fairly difficult novels, L-R is no
longer necessary.
“Listening-reading” is for LEARNING
a language. Natural listening means using and enjoying the language. Of course,
after a while, L-R will be getting more and more ‘natural’ because more and
more passages will have become easy.
Acquiring ANY SKILL means going
through an INCUBATION PERIOD, during which you get
confused time and again at first.
I found out from my own experience
and a few hundreds people studying on their own:
To get to the stage of NATURAL
listening you have to do about 20 to 30 hours of ‘listening-reading’ to NEW
TEXTS with almost full understanding.
You might get down even to 10 hours,
it mostly depends on the ‘density’ (= new words per page) of the texts and how
difficult a text you start with is.
Listening to a short text time and
again does not mean new exposure, it is still the same mechanical repetition.
It might have its merits as well: you’re exposed to sounds, rhythm and
intonation, but that’s about it, nothing more.
NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE DONE AT THE
EXPENSE OF EXPOSURE until you get to natural listening to difficult texts.
Some say listening comprehension is
passive.
I couldn’t agree less, it is the
most difficult skill to acquire. On how you do it depends a great deal:
pronunciation, speaking, and to a large extent reading and writing.
I might say: God DID know what
s/he/they was/were doing when s/he/they told us to listen first and then learn
how to speak, and much later to invent writing.
But we are clever enough to cheat on
her/him/them and use writing to acquire listening skills as well.
When you’ve come to the stage of
natural listening you might decide you’d like to say something to your beloved.
And here there’s one more minor
obstacle to overcome: PRONUNCIATION (phonemes,
stress, tones, pitch accent, rhythm, intonation).
It does matter whether you
distinguish shit and sheet in English, or proszę and prosię in Polish, or blé
and bleu in French and so on.
It’s not difficult at all: right
amount of listening-reading, natural listening and phonetic listening does the
trick.
SPEAKING is easy: almost everything
depends on the above. You might decide to repeat after the recording, after
you’ve reached the stage of natural listening it should be very easy and done
without any effort. It does not matter if you repeat each word, phrase or
sentence.
While repeating after the recording
(professional actors in fact) you’d better not look at the written text, for
two reasons:
1. interference of your mother
tongue, particularly when LSD1 and LSD2 use the same alphabet
2. speaking means taking SOUNDS out
of your brain, not reading aloud.
I might add here as well: taking
part in a conversation means first of all being able to understand what is
being said to you.
GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY
are in the texts,
why should you bother with lengthy
and often wrong explanations?
When LSD1 and LSD2 are not closely
related, say English and Japanese or to a lesser extent Polish and Japanese
(Polish is much more complicated grammatically than English, though from the
point of view of a Japanese person, they are two different dialects of the same
language), you might want to read some basic information about LSD2.
When you’ve done the right amount of
listening-reading with parallel texts, you don’t have to learn the skill
separately.
With languages using a different
script, say Japanese for Indo-Europeans
(us, unlucky bastards), ‘listening-reading’ saves a lot of toil, thousands of
hours compared with traditional methods using textbooks and flashcards.
WRITING
‘on the wall
together we stand, divided we fall’
After the right amount of exposure
to complicated texts with full and beautiful DISCOURSE, a little bit of written
retranslation from LSD2 to LSD1 should be enough.
You don’t need to translate whole
books, though, only the phrases or sentences you feel you wouldn’t be able to
say or write yourself.
aYa
‘Listening-reading’ is a SYSTEM (= a set of interdependent elements that mean something
as a whole, in opposition to each other in the set, not separately). If you
skip or omit one element, the structure crumbles.
aYa
Let me be stubborn once more.
‘Listening-reading’ is a system and that’s its only
advantage. Not its particular components, not even STEP 3, or ALE as it was
renamed by a guy who has his family to feed (I hope they are not hungry like some poor bastards in Darfur or Palestine).
((I meant Steve Kaufmann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqVhgSvwWYk http://www.lingq.com/))
You can incorporate SOME elements
into your own learning, but to exploit L-R to the maximum it is much better to
use it as a whole. That’s what I mean by L-R.
aYa
1. I gather materials: audiobooks,
etexts, pronunciation courses, computer dictionaries with audio, mouse-over pop-up
dictionaries, reference grammars with audio.
2. I read about L2 culture:
literature, history, geography, and movies. I read translated books and watch
subtitled movies, I listen to songs.
3. I study pronunciation
very carefully – recognition stage only, I don't produce anything until I reach
natural listening.
4. Grammar overview – I read two or
three grammar handbooks, study grammar tables, sentence patterns. I don't do
any exercises, I want to have a general idea about the language. I often make
my own cheat sheets and print them to have them handy for quick reference. All
the necessary info usually boils down to two or three pages plus some tables.
A general remark:
If you want to do something fast and
well, you must have enough materials and all the necessary tools, otherwise it
is not worth beginning.
On the other had, if you can wait
and you are sure you really want to achieve it, you can begin anytime with
whatever you have.
aYa
1. Ninety seconds a minute.
2. Everything you’ve done or haven’t
done ever since you were born influences how enjoyable or miserable, fast or
painfully slow your learning will be.
If you have hardly ever set your own
goals, if you have hardly ever learnt anything on your own, if you have never
read a novel worth reading, if you cannot tell your verbs from your adjectives,
your vowels from your consonants, if you don’t get enough sleep regularly, if
you think your time is to fritter away and kill mercilessly, you can’t expect
miracles.
aYa
What you can expect if you are as good as
(or better than) I was
If you can fill the unforgiving
minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of
distance run.
Rudyard
Kipling
Being intelligent enough is not
enough – you must be pretty enough.
ASSAULT = massive exposure in a
short period of time
Why?
The curves of learning and
forgetting and overlearning.
Any decent textbook on general
psychology begs you to be read.
I don't believe in learning a little
bit every day. I believe in learning a huge bit every minute. That's why when I
do decide to learn a new language, I do it for 12-15 hours a day for a week or
three, and then I'm able to use the language. I use my old languages to learn a
new one, usually through multilingual L-R.
See AWE as well.
It might sound strange but the
ASSAULT (massive exposure for hours on end) is a reward for good life.
Do you love what you’re doing?
Have you ever read books for hours,
days or weeks on end with constant joy and wonder?
Do you get enough sleep?
Never underestimate the power of a
fraction of a second.
aYa
If you still wonder why long texts
are so important, I'm sure you haven't read anything about idiolect, text
statistics, discourse analysis or the curves of learning and forgetting, and
overlearning.
If you don't have parallel texts, do
the following:
1. read a page (or a paragraph) in
L1
2. listen and look at the text in
L2, trying to attach some meaning to it
3. listen and look at the text in
L1, trying to attach some meaning to what you're hearing.
If you don't have the written text
in L2, skip step 2, try to do Step 3 from the beginning to the end, but perhaps
more times.
aYa
Phases in acquiring language skills:
PERCEPTION: partial – full
RECOGNITION: partial – full
REPRODUCTION: partial – full
PRODUCTION: partial – full
aYa
Vanity’s French bootcamp
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=8911
|
vanityx3 wrote:
|
That's exactly what happens in the
incubation period. If you go on L-Reading intensively, full sentences will
start to pop-up sooner rather than later. The brain is finding its way through
the maze and building up a coherent system.
aYa
TIME
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
Rudyard Kipling
1 000 000 – your lifetime (hours),
if you're extremely lucky
sleep
doing nothing:
school
TV, Internet,
computer games, gossiping, etc
sensory memory:
iconic
(approximately 0.3 seconds)
echoic (up to 2
seconds)
= ‘the best possible results in the shortest
period of time with minimum effort in the most enjoyable way’
1. goals (yourself, somebody else forces you, primum non nocere, illusions, ‘an ideal’, advanced organizer*)
2. tools (yourself: love, thinking, skills; time, materials, methods,
friends, institutions)
3. control (yourself, external)
*advanced
organizer – things that should be done before (or sometimes concurrently)
you start achieving your goal
LEARNING
= putting something new into your
brain
sensory memory
iconic
echoic
PRONUNCIATION
Theoretician/awareness
general (what and
how)
detailed: L1, L2, L1<->L2
Listening
phonematic
(minimal pairs)
phonetic (rhythm,
intonation, stress, pitch accent, tones, colloquial contractions, etc)
L-R
(concurrent advanced organizer; listening to personally relevant meaning)
The Base (tongue and lips movements)
Control
yourself
external
Sounds<->letters (letters,
kanji, hanzi, etc)
L1<->L2
EXPOSURE/INPUT
Emotions (engine): love, joy, soul shattering awe
(flow)
Long texts (novels) – emotions,
personally relevant meaning, non-mechanical repetition
L-R (read L1
listen L2)
PRODUCTION
advanced organizer: L-R, natural
listening, pronunciation
speaking
(repeating after the recording, recitation)
writing
L-R
is (theoretically and practically) the quickest way of delivering personally
relevant input into your brain through sensory memory.
aYa
PREPARING
Awareness
Knowing
what
Knowing
how
Setting goals
extra-linguistic
linguistic
Gathering
materials
Time (Have you
lived a million hours?)
Language skills in
your mother tongue
LEARNING (= putting into your head)
“listening-reading”
incubation period
phonetic
listening
reproduction
repeating after the reader
speaking
reproduction
production
reading
“listening-reading”
reading proper
writing
reproduction
writing
proper
USING
COMMUNICATION
CONVERSATION
listening skills
pronunciation
pragmatic skills
vocabulary
grammar
TESTING
good for nothing
it’s for teachers to make you believe they are necessary and they know better
it’s for publishers to trick you into buying their books
it’s for school authorities and politicians to make a living and control you,
and tell you what you should do and fear them
aYa
PRONUNCIATION
AWARENESS
inventory of the phonemes* of your
mother tongue
movements of the lips and tongue to
produce the phonemes
*phonemes – sounds
that differentiate the meaning of words in a given language. Each language has
its own set of phonemes, they are never the same as phonemes in even closely
related languages. 99% of learners use L1 phonemes in L2, they are not aware of
the difference.
inventory of the phonemes of the
target language
phonematic listening: minimal
pairs*, tones, pitch accent
phonetic listening: stress, rhythm,
intonation
*a minimal pair –
two words with one sound different, eg (British Received Pronunciation):
bit-pit, bit-beat, pit-pat; or Polish: lec-leć, pasek-piasek, kasza-Kasia-kasa
careful comparison of L1 (= mother
tongue) and L2 (= target language)
(Try to) listen to L2 native speaker
speaking your L1 – the more mistakes he makes, the better. Then try to speak
your L1 the way he speaks your L1, you’ll become aware of how the two languages
differ phonetically in a jiffy. I call it ‘the bridge’ – see Stairway to Heaven
below.
PRODUCTION
Do not try to speak until you've
reached the stage of natural listening (= only
after the incubation period of L-R)
Repeat after the speaker what you
only understand (the meaning) and can hear properly (phonemes, rhythm, etc)
Listen-repeat – if it's correct: listen-repeat,
listen-repeat
if it's not correct, do not repeat any more, only
listen
First small chunks (even syllables)
here and there while natural listening to something you enjoy, then the chunks
will get longer and longer.
Shadow/echo (= repeat after the
speaker/s) longer sentences and texts.
Recite: choose a few of your favourite
pictures (to create "psychological environment"), put on some
pleasant background music, and imagine why the people (or things) in the pictures
use a word, phrase, chunk, sentence, short dialogue you've just
echoed/shadowed; play all the people/things.
Recitation is a stage between
echoing/shadowing and speaking proper, entirely on your own.
You can echo-recite too – you repeat
after the reader and imagine your own context at the same time.
If creating your own contexts takes
you too much time, because you can’t do it on the fly, don’t do it, or learn
how to do it quickly.
Recitation is not so important –
it's just for fun and variety.
What really counts is listening and
repeating after the recording.
Blind shadowing (without
understanding) is a waste of time and effort.
aYa
listen→analyse→listen→(bridge/nucleus)→listen→repeat→listen→repeat→automate
bridge – L1 sounds and words
pronounced the L2 way
nucleus – L2 sounds, words, phrases,
and sentences that you already pronounce correctly and you KNOW that.
Example:
Let’s say I want to learn how to
pronounce ‘lick’.
I listen to it, I analyse it: /lik/
/l/ alveolar, not palatalized,
/i/ short, not to be confused with
/i:/ or Polish /i/ and /y/, /i/ slightly shorter than /i/ in ‘lid’
/k/ aspirated slightly
I listen again (a few times, if
necessary)
bridge/nucleus – I already know how
to say ‘Lily’ – I listen to ‘lick’ and say ‘Lily’ (a few times if necessary), I
listen to ‘lick’ and say ‘lick’, if it is correct I listen-repeat,
listen-repeat and then recite. My ‘nucleus’ has grown – one more word in it.
I automate:
I listen-repeat-read, I
listen-repeat-read, I repeat-read, I read.
I listen-repeat-read-write, I
listen-repeat-read-write, I repeat-read-write, I read-write, I write.
I use: Lily, lick! Lick, Lily. Lick
Lily. I lick Lily. I don’t lick Daisy, I lick Lily. Lily licks Daisy. It’s a
licking daisy-chain.
aYa
I remember having trouble
pronouncing German ‘r’ sound. Here’s what I did. I recorded the sound (the
sound only, not words with it) many times on a cassette and kept listening to
it for a long time, I don’t remember exactly how long, perhaps a few days even,
I did other things in the meantime, and suddenly – I was able to say it with no
trouble at all.
aYa
There are two kinds of pronunciation
mistakes:
1. phonematic – affecting the
meaning, eg. shit instead of sheet
2. simply phonetic, sounding foreign
but not affecting the meaning, eg. pussy with "p" without aspiration
The first kind is to be avoided at
all costs.
Is good pronunciation important at
all?
It affects your listening skills, your
speaking skills, your spelling and your reading. It affects your motivation and
psychological well-being. It's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.
Is good pronunciation difficult to
achieve?
NO. If you get down to it properly.
0. L1 pronunciation – you must learn
thoroughly about it
1. do not speak, do not write, (and
do not read without listening) until you've reached the stage of natural
listening
2. practice some phonetic listening
3. repeat after the actor/reader
only when you fully understand what is being said and you hear the sounds,
tones, rhythm etc properly
4. avoid NEGATIVE exposure:
non-native speakers and fellow students (garbage in, garbage out)
5. do not "charge" at
difficult sounds, words etc, do not try to repeat them at all costs, concentrate
on what is positive: easy and pleasant.
6. do not blind-shadow (see 5.)
It usually takes about 30 to 40
hours of active phonetic study to be able to repeat and recite
absolutely correctly new words, phrases, and short sentences.
Why do teachers say pronunciation is
not (so) important?
1. Their own pronunciation sucks.
2. They have no idea that they ought
to teach it and how to teach it.
3. They are lazy, they do not care.
Everybody who is incapable of
learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
I once witnessed the following:
seemingly an ideal situation for learning a language: – one teacher – a native
speaker of French (he didn’t know Polish), and one pupil – a ten-year-old
Polish girl. They were reading a French book, it went like this: the teacher
read a sentence and the girl repeated it. She did it almost perfectly but not
quite – the teacher hesitated for an awkward moment (his hesitation was
audible, he was breathing differently), he didn’t know what to do with it, and
went on reading the next sentence. The same happened time and again for an hour
or so. How the girl knew what the text meant – I’ve no idea, she probably
didn’t.
They didn’t know I was present, I
was behind a screen.
It would have been enough if the
teacher had said a few minimal pairs for the girl to hear the difference
properly, but the teacher didn’t probably have any idea about phonetics and how
to teach it.
Another example: I once met an
American guy (a university graduate, history) who taught English to Polish
university students. He told me that his students had to teach him what
‘passive voice’ was. He had no idea. When I asked him if he knew what ‘minimal
pairs’ were he had no idea, either. (Apparently, his students didn’t know,
either – I’m sure they would have taught him.)
Who’s to blame? No idea. Not me. If
an engineer constructed cars the way the majority of teachers teach, he would
go to jail.
aYa
Question:
My understanding, based on that, is
that I can echo anything, as long as it's something I would understand in natural listening. Is this correct?
Answer:
I only echo when I can hear the
sounds properly, and when I understand the meaning, the sounds, the movements
of the lips and the tongue – I listen-repeat when I feel I'm ready – if it's OK
– I listen-repeat-listen-repeat many times and then recite.
And if it is not OK, I do not repeat more than once, I go on listening. I do
not force production – it is the most SERIOUS blunder people make – including
Arguelles, his Mandarin tones are just far from what they should be (his
Russian was far from perfect – to put it mildly), not to mention Zhuangzi's
Russian.
Of course, you can echo anything you
want – it depends on how important pronunciation is to you. I know a Russian
translator – he translates Russian literature from Russian into English – and
he's very good, but when he speaks I'm sure hardly any native speaker of
English understands him.
aYa
Here’s how a good pronunciation
course looks like (for learners of English) – info:
The
Sky Pronunciation Suite – a video demonstration.flv
www.antimoon.com/other/myths-foraccent.htm
Myth #5:
"You are a foreigner, therefore
you will always have a foreign accent"
ERRRRORS
1. learning – avoid them
2. using (communication) – do not be
afraid of them
aYa
Look at this: 'to jest'
Do you know how to pronounce it?
Of course, you must be joking.
OK, say it aloud. I can't hear you.
I still can't hear you. Where's the play button? The link is broken. There's no
play button.
I've been looking at 'to jest' for
twenty minutes and I still don't know how to pronounce it.
My neighbour has a daughter. She can
read anything. Give her a newspaper, she will read it. Give her a psychology
book, she will read it. She is extremely clever, but she's only four and still
has trouble with some sounds in her mother tongue.
I wrote: 'to jest pszczoła' and
asked her to read it. 'To jest pscoła' she said.
I wrote: '発音' and asked if she could read it.
She laughed and said it was a picture, you look at pictures, you admire them or
hate them, you can't read them. It's a funny picture, says she, it reminds her
of a scary clown.
‘You can read pictures like these,’
I said.
So how do you pronounce it? she laughed.
'Hacuon' I said.
'Hacuon' she repeated. Why don't you
write it the way you say it, then.
I wrote: ‘hatuon’.
She looked at it. But it says
'hatuon', you can't even write, she said.
You're right, I said. In fact you
write it はつおん.
You're pulling my leg, says she.
Those are not letters, I can't read them.
I can, I said.
How?
Because I know. I learned how.
How did you learn?
I listened and looked, that's how...
I wrote: 'know'.
'Knof (k-n-o-f)' she read.
No, I said. You say it 'no'. And I wrote
'no'.
You're pulling my leg, she said. You
say 'noł' and you write 'know' and 'no'? The same?
Yes, I said. More or less. But I
don't say 'noł', I say '/nəʊ/.
So you know now?
Yes, she said. I know you're pulling
my leg.
Which leg? I asked. You have two
legs.
By the way, 'To jest pszczoła' means
'This/that/it is a/the bee'. That’s what it means. But you still don't know how
to pronounce it.
aYa
Any time you feel like it, damn it!
I start when I’m ready:
1. I first study L2 pronunciation
very carefully.
2. I reach the stage of natural listening to difficult texts.
3. I repeat after the recording, recite, and use L2 in my daily life – I think and/or mutter
under my breath.
aYa
In the kitchen.
The father to his two-year-old son:
Pete, this is rabarbar. Repeat.
His son doesn't know what he is
expected to say and gets tense.
The father repeats once more, angry this
time:
Pete, this is rabarbar. Repeat.
Pete gets frightened, doesn't say
anything.
I take Pete upstairs to his older
sister's room. We take a comic book: Tintin.
Pete's sister learns English and likes the book very much, and needless to say,
Pete likes his fourteen-year-old sister and her room full of books.
I open the book and just say
‘Tintin’ pointing to the pictures. I do it a dozen times. Then suddenly, Pete,
smiling, says: Tintin, Tintin, Tintin, pointing to the drawings. We are happy
together.
Moral 1:
Pete is now eighteen. He hates rabarbar (rhubarb), but he still enjoys
reading Tintin.
Moral 2:
You learn more from children than
university professors.
aYa
usually completely overlooked by
learners.
|
Quote:
|
An educated person reads faster than
anyone speaks. So we have time to analyse what we are hearing. You MUST
analyse, L-R is not mechanical. If you don't
analyse or are just incapable of doing it, L-R is useless for you. You must
analyse quickly enough without stopping the tape too often. It is a demanding
task. If you are not intelligent enough, you won’t be able to do it, either.
But being intelligent enough is not enough – you must be pretty enough as well. To some extent L-R is similar
to simultaneous interpretation. The more difficult the text, the greater the
similarity.
An incubation period is needed to
acquire a new skill (listening comprehension), you must get enough input. Too
short a text is useless for L-R. Handbooks are too short and usually extremely
boring.
You only remember what you
understand and what is relevant to you. Beginners need word-for-word
translation (plus some grammar explanations, if necessary).
Texts should be self-explanatory, you should know in advance
the meaning of what you are going to hear.
If you do L-R not intensively
enough, it will be useless for you. The more difficult the text you begin with,
the more intensive L-R should be. Two hours a day seems to be the minimum for
relatively easy texts.
Parallel texts are extremely useful.
The more difficult the text, the more useful they become. The columns shouldn’t
be too wide, not more than eight cm, you can jump from one column to the other
if necessary without stopping the recording too often. E-texts are more useful,
you can use a pop-up dictionary, you can change the font, make it bigger or
smaller – it is particularly useful for Japanese and Chinese.
For Japanese
texts, there should be three columns:
kanji (without furigana) – spaced
hiragana transcription – translation plus grammar.
或日の暮方の事である。 ある ひ の くれがた の こと で ある。 translation in your language
A good pop-up dictionary is
necessary.
aYa
Language is a system, so it's really not possible to say that
something is more important than anything else – pronunciation, grammar,
vocabulary, discourse (here: how the text is organized), listening, reading,
speaking, writing.
I love stories, so I want to
understand them as quickly as possible.
I use the same books I love to learn
a new language. Audiobooks, the text in L2 plus translation, a good reference
grammar (and sometimes a dictionary when the translation is not clear), that's
all I need.
I use The Little Prince, Camus,
Kafka, Anna Karenina, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, The Old Man
and the Sea, Andersen's fairy tales, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne. (more books)
I never get tired of them. I can
start listening and/or reading any of the books and I'm always in awe: the
mystery of the human soul right before your eyes, and you can constantly smile
at it, or – sometimes – cry, but it's happiness, nonetheless.
And this AWE-state is the most
important factor – the beauty of it is breathtaking, you never get tired of it,
you always want more and you're happy. (flow)
In Polish:
|
FALA NOŚNA: coś, co cię nie męczy i
niesie ku niebu, radość ci sprawia ogromną. |
cudowne nic
bez granic
poezJa
aYa
There are two new elements in L-R – the crucial ones:
– using long novels (parallel texts and audio)
right from the start, even for zero beginners.
– using self-explanatory
texts. I mean:
Knowing in advance the meaning of
what you're going to listen to and the text being psychologically yours and relevant.
Examples:
The Bible for a Jehovah's witness or
a book you've read many times since you were a child.
Each element of L-R separately does
not seem so significant. If you put them together as a whole system, they
become extremely effective, the most important ones being:
– AWE
– massive exposure in a
short period of time
– self-explanatory texts
– parallel e-novels with good quality audio
– Step 3 (read L1, listen L2) (See ‘The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R.’)
– learning how to pronounce
properly
Learning any language in any way is
not for everybody, almost everyone fails miserably.
aYa
buonaparte
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7082
As to L-R,
the only thing worth being called a method is one's own method.
I can definitely call L-R 'a method'
because it works for me. No idea if you can call it 'a method.'
There are some rather extreme
pre-conditions for L-R to work properly.
1. burning desire to learn
2. you must love what you're doing
3. you must be a fast enough reader
4. you must be a good listener, you
need some sound/phonetic training both in L1 and L2
5. you must be able to concentrate
for a long time
6. you must be a good learner in
general
7. you must be able to process a
huge amount of info almost on the fly
8. a regular lifestyle – early to
bed, early to rise...
9. very good language skills in L1
10. being intelligent enough is not
enough – you must be pretty enough
11. you must know first-hand or
rather first-soul what GOOD literature is all about
12. ONLY THE BEST is good enough – I
mean both your skills and materials.
Technically speaking, you need long
books you love and are extremely familiar with in languages you already know.
You need good quality audio + parallel
L2-L1 etexts and a good mouse-over pop-up dictionary.
(L2 – the language you're learning, L1 – your mother tongue)
Then again: the most important
things happen in your head.
I wish you the best of British.
aYa
I’ve been visiting language learning
boards for some ten years now.
I read a post or two here and there,
if it’s not too long....
Language learners – categories
0. know-it-alls – usually one, two,
or three people – they have hardly anything to say, but say it very loudly and
actively, their posts tend to be very long, they litter almost every thread
with their intellectual and scientific musings, and argue forever with anyone
who’s stupid enough to argue with them
1. dreamers – they would like to,
they make lists, they buy books, CDs...
2. grasshoppers – they jump here and
there, they begin, they don’t finish, begin something else, don’t finish
3. soldiers – they charge, they
annihilate, they memorize, they believe in self-discipline, they like military
atmosphere at home, they rarely succeed, it usually ends in General
Consternation, Major Disaster or Private Property.
4. teachers, translators,
interpreters – they often think they are experts – but they usually aren’t,
they overestimate their abilities (too many not so learned morons among them)
5. hobbyists – they are in no hurry,
they usually like what they are doing, they often succeed
6. AWE riders – I’m
sure I’m not the only one. flow
6 is such a pretty number. Good
enough for L-R.
|
1. It is not watching subtitled
movies. (See My comment about the above passage:)
2. It is not just listening to L2
and reading/looking at the text in L2.
3. No, L-R is NOT Assimil and suchlike.
4. Would I be doing L-R mechanically
without understanding the vast majority of what I am listening to, the way some
people seem to understand L-R should be done?
NO (rising-falling intonation).
aYa
If you can fill the unforgiving
minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of
distance run.
Rudyard
Kipling
Example:
L2 German, the book: The Trial by Franz Kafka,
translated into Polish by Bruno Schulz (his woman
translated it to be exact), the translation is very good and very faithful.
It took me 3 (three) days (30 to 35
hours of listening) to be able to understand every single word in the book read
in German by Gert Westphal.
What I knew before I started to L-R it:
I knew the book (I read it in Polish,
Russian, etc) and loved it.
I could recognize all the German
phonemes and their corresponding letter combinations.
I was able to recognize basic
grammar structures (morphology and syntax).
I could recognize in speech and in
writing the meaning of some 800 words. (probably less).
(I couldn’t speak the language, I
never try until I reach ‘natural listening’
stage. Of course, I would have been able to speak ‘survival’ German, if I’d
been forced to.)
I used cassettes and two printed
books, I had no parallel texts.
When I started only listening to it
I didn’t understand anything, just a word here and there.
But when I started reading in Polish
and listening to the German reader at the same time I was able to understand
virtually everything, for a fleeting moment of course, I didn’t bother to
memorize anything, I was just going with the flow of the soul shattering
experience that only a masterpiece can deliver/provide/drown you.
As I had no parallel texts with
matching chunks, I did the following:
I read a page in Polish, I listened
to German and looked at the German text, I paid attention to the meaning,
grammar, and letters-phonemes correspondence.
Then another page, and so on, until
the end of the book. I understood almost everything.
It was the first day.
The second day:
I only read in Polish and listened
to the German reader and the same time. I understood everything.
The third day – I only listened to
the German reader. I understood almost everything.
I worked ten to twelve hours a day.
I made 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes. I did some physical exercises.
I had three meals a day. I slept
eight hours a day. I was healthy.
And then I tested myself:
I took a recording in German – it
was The Snow Queen by Andersen. I hadn’t read the story before, so I knew
nothing about it. And... I understood it...
I noticed something very interesting
about intensive L-R (and then natural
listening) – after a while (two-four weeks, 10-15 hours a day), speaking (and
writing for languages with alphabet) come naturally, there are only two
conditions to activate the skills, phonetic training and repeating after the
recording here and there while listening to something you understand and enjoy.
ONE MORE THING:
if you’re unable to attach the (or
at least some) meaning from what you’ve just read to what you’re LISTENING to,
you cannot say it is L-R. I would consider it pointless.
Let me say it once more: L-R is not
mechanical.
If you know hardly anything about the
language, the first 3 to 5 hours need to be translated
word for word with some grammar commentary, the way I did for French, English,
and German for Polish learners of the languages. Examples of literary texts for
zero beginners. To download:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/ai.7z
OK, but...
will it work for you, the reader?
No idea, probably not.
There’s a fundamental difference
between us:
I know it works (for me), because I’ve done it.
YOU think I’m lying or just pulling your leg or
even both of your legs.
You’ll never know until you try.
It seems to work somehow for some
people: MarcoDiAngelo, LG Maluszka Volte,
mjcdchess, minus273, M. Medialis, Adrean, lingoleng, jeff_lindqvist, shapd, luke, Serpent, etc.
There are people who disliked it
intensely, too (to put it mildly).
Some people tried to L-R
mechanically without understanding, nothing could have come out of it, of course
(just a headache, probably).
Being intelligent enough is not
enough – you must be pretty enough.
Anyway, people are usually just
dreamers or grasshoppers (they jump here and there without knowing what for). They
don’t usually love anything, not even their own self, not to mention their
neighbours or... good literature. What’s more, language learners usually ignore
pronunciation and listening comprehension – absolutely essential skills. I
don’t really know why. IGNORANCE IS their STRENGTH.
Ignorance is bliss? A fool’s
paradise.
aYa
0. Don't read any advice. Use your
own head (if you have any).
00. Learn your own language
properly.
Learn how to read, listen, speak, and
WRITE beautifully, coherently and succinctly in your mother tongue.
Learn about the grammar and
phonetics of your language.
000. Read some good books on
psychology of learning and efficient action.
0000. Then learning any languages
will be just a piece of cake.
aYa
The majority of people don't write
anything in any language and yet they manage to survive.
I'd say writing – if taken seriously
– forces you to think like nothing else, so it's always worth doing, unless you
don't like thinking.
aYa
|
Hans Christian Andersen:
|
Is it a text for zero
beginners – no previous knowledge of English? Any teacher would say I'm crazy.
Any ten-year-old child can L-R it five times during 15
minutes. She won't
get bored and will enjoy herself. Then she can do another story and another
one. If she feels like it.
All she needs is a good recording
and an interlinear translation.
Księżniczka i (ziarnko) grochu
1. Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry
Pewnego razu był książę kto/który chciał poślubić
2. a princess, but who would have to be a real princess! He
księżniczkę ale
kto/która by musiała być
prawdziwą księżniczką! On
3. travelled all over the world
trying to find one but he couldn’t
podróżował po całym świecie próbując znaleźć jedną ale on nie mógł
4. find what he wanted anywhere. There
were plenty of princesses,
znaleźć co on chciał gdziekolwiek . Było wiele księżniczek,
5. but whether they were real princesses he found it difficult to
ale czy one były prawdziwymi księżniczkami on
znajdował to trudnym do
6. tell. There was always something that didn’t seem quite
right.
powiedzenia. Było zawsze coś co (że) nie wydawało się całkiem poprawne.
7. So at last he came home again and was quite sad, because he
Więc w końcu on przyjechał do domu znowu i był
całkiem smutny, ponieważ on
8. wished so much to have a real princess for his
wife.
życzył/pragnął tak bardzo mieć prawdziwą księżniczkę za jego/swoją żonę.
It is for
Polish learners of English.
The text is first to be read in
literary translation, in Polish. When in doubt you can use a mouse-over pop-up
dictionary.
I’m not sure
if the text will be displayed properly, the text is meant to be opened in Word
2003, see the pdf version.
(See
If you don’t have word-for-word
interlinear texts, you can:
1. ask others to prepare them for
you
2. use a mouse-over pop-up
dictionary and learn some grammar first
3. do a handbook or two for
beginners (basic grammar + vocabulary)
4. use Google translate.
aYa
Texts
1. ideal:
(not just any texts) written by
educated native speakers for educated native speakers (good writers, scholars,
journalists) read aloud by professional actors/narrators
2. self-explanatory:
the more you BEFOREHAND know about
the text you’re going to study the better.
„Der Prozess” by Franz Kafka or
„Lolita” by Nabokov for me, I’ve time and again read and LISTENED to them in
many languages, so I almost know them by heart.
3. "extra-linguistic":
they concentrate on the plot not
grammar points or vocabulary
4. „tool kit”:
e-texts in vertical parallel columns, good translation, good audio
recording (mp3, wav), mouse-over pop-up dictionary
word-for-word interlinear
texts for beginners
5. JOY or/and
wonder
The first ten to twenty pages
(idiolect) might be extremely difficult, but if you don’t give up too soon
because you’re scared or frustrated it will become easier and easier, the
longer the book the easier it will be to understand.
aYa
Good quality literature very often
has good translations.
It does not matter if it is 100%
exact, words mean something only in context, and very soon you're able to guess
the exact meaning, occasionally you can use a pop up dictionary.
aYa
As to making parallel texts: it takes time and
effort, but it is more effective and much cheaper than buying textbooks
(ASSimil, Pimpsleur, Rosetta Stoned, etc). In one chapter of a novel there are
more words, sentences and text than in any language textbook.
You can use somebody else’s parallel
texts: I posted plenty of parallel Xlanguage-English novels/books in many
languages: Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Polish, French, German,
Spanish, Italian, Korean, Hungarian, Latvian, and so on. There ARE people who
make parallel texts – you can always ask Our Mother, the Internet.
I compiled and posted plenty of
parallel Japanese-English materials – from pronunciation (pitch accent
included), simple grammars with audio, dialogues for learners, news, to
books/novels.
I already made and posted plenty of
book2 (a site, 42 lanugages, amateurish, but everything seems to be recorded by
native speakers – two thousand words and phrases) sentence-by-sentence parallel
materials for beginners, too.
You can use them instead of
interlinear word-for-word translations of novels for beginners. You must make
do with what you get.
aYa
Use a mouse-over pop-up dictionary –
Lingvo 12 seems to be the best, it’s multilingual, professional, on-screen
mouse-over pop-up, you can add your own dictionaries or other dictionaries in
any languages, you have to convert them to Lingvo 12 format first, or you can
always ask Our Mother.
aYa
My idea of parallel
texts seems to be different from yours. I thought I made it clear in my
first entry:
1. An AUDIO recording by
professional actor(s), in mp3 or wav format
2. E-texts in VERTICAL COLUMNS, side
by side on one page
3. Texts should be long, up to 50
hours.
Anything else may slightly resemble
the idea. A while ago I uploaded a sample of what I mean by parallel texts.
aYa
EXPOSURE: {new
text (audio+written, see above)} divided by {minute times hours times days}
Hours and days should be counted
from the first moment you start learning, sleep and anything else INCLUDED.
The text can be measured in pages or
words or minutes (silence and music excluded).
aYa
You all seem to overlook one important
factor:
if you don't enjoy (I might say
"passionately in love") the texts you're going to
"listen-read", you won't get much out of it, your attention will
constantly be distracted and you will get bored. And then .... happy-go-lucky
Miss Hopper won't be done good and proper.
aYa
"Le petit prince" is not
enough, it is far too short.
What you should do in STEP 3 is
not just look at the translation but
READ it before the matching texts in the recording reaches your brain, and try
to simultaneously attach the meaning to what you're hearing, at least part of
it, without stopping the tape (= audiofile) all the time. If you're not able to
do it, you must repeat Step 2.
And it would be wonderful if you
knew why the idiolect of the author is so important and why the texts should be
long.
And do not forget to be passionately
in love with what you're listening-reading.
The whole process is far from
mechanical, it is not school. You have to use all your imagination and power of
concentration.
aYa
The greatest source of audiobooks
are libraries for visually handicapped people and p2p.
aYa
The layout
of the e-texts is important. If you have downloaded the sample I uploaded a
while ago (if you haven't, the link is somewhere in the thread), you may see
the different variations.
For beginners the ideal one is interlinear – the original above, the word-for-word translation
below, but it is extremely time consuming to prepare such texts.
Interlinear texts are known from
time immemorial, I've seen some from the seventeenth century.
There are some available now, too.
The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament.
I've made some myself for Polish
learners of English and German.
Interlinear e-texts should be made
by people who already know the two languages. And translated word for word,
otherwise they do not make much sense.
They are not absolutely necessary. It
is enough to make vertical parallel columns.
aYa
Read a page or a paragraph (in your
mother tongue), do STEP 2 AND 3 one to three times and go on. Do it from the
beginning to the end of the novel. Then start again from the beginning, it will
be much easier. The third time should be quite easy or not even necessary.
The longer the novel the better.
You might want to read something
more about text statistics, IDIOLECT and memory first.
And try not to use popular pulp
fiction (Harry Potter etc), they are usually very poorly translated. Use good
literature – it is more probable the translation will match the original.
aYa
As to Harry Potter.
You can use it if you like it very
much or have no other choice.
Many people, not only children, like
it.
I've made parallel texts of the HP
books in English-Polish-French-Spanish-German-Japanese, and seen some
translations into some other languages, the quality was rather discouraging,
plenty of omissions, paraphrasing, and simply errors. But still some children
liked to "listen-read" them, probably because it appealed to them
psychologically.
HP has its merits, too:
1. it's easily available: e-texts +
audio in soooo many languages
2. very long
3. modern
4. quite simple
I cannot stand it because of poor artistic
quality and it's damn boring.
You could use it when you've reached
the stage of "natural listening".
aYa
The ideal for
"listening-reading" would be if the first few hours were translated word
for word and commented grammatically – I did it for Le petit prince in French
and
A lot depends on how closely the two
languages are related.
For instance, for a Pole learning
Russian, the word-for-word translation is not necessary, and you can start from
more difficult books.
The same applies to French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese and even English for a speaker of Romance languages.
aYa
Vertical side-by-side
texts are much easier to use. You can check the meaning or the spelling
instantly without stopping the audio. Echoic and iconic memories are very short
(less than one second), so you get lost when you use printed books.
Once you've prepared a bilingual
parallel text, it is easy to make multilingual ones, you just copy one side and
paste it into another version.
You can translate easily using
vertical texts, you just cover one side.
You can see what is missing and
wonder why it is so.
You can learn quite a lot about
HUMAN NATURE, while preparing parallel texts:
1. CENSORSHIP – ubiquitous, but
North Americans excel in it.
The
funniest I’ve seen so far was a censored version of 1984 by Orwell (in Spanish). They censor everything, even H.C.
Andersen.
2. Bungling and cheating: I once saw
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
with the label ‘Complete and unabridged’ on the cover and I bought it. Then at
home I couldn’t believe my eyes, I checked against the Russian original: at
least one third of the text was missing.
The same applies to ‘unabridged’
audiobooks.
I'm against censorship anywhere any
time, be it
I've made too many parallel novels
not to be aware it's rampant everywhere. But in the US of A it is particularly
so.
I don't need to live in the US of A
to know censorship is RAMPANT there.
Censorship has a lot to do with
parallel texts.
It happens time and again, I buy
books, audiobooks, just to waste the money and time and trust.
Who’s a translator? A guy who wants
to make some money at the expense of the author.
Who’s a publisher? A guy who wants
to make big money at the expense of the author and the translator.
Some authors want to make some money
at the expense of the reader.
Some authors write ad maiorem 愛子さま gloriam. Some of them are the only ones who write
really well.
Money is the most important goal
both for the translator and the publisher. Love of literature is a
contradiction in terms for them. No wonder they cheat. At OUR expense,
literature lovers.
There ought to be a law enforced by
God Almighty: All translated texts should be published as parallel ones, there
would be less cheating and bungling.
And censorship would be more
difficult.
aYa
If you'd rather use a printed
version, you can print an e-text, and a computer is an excellent tool for
printing.
aYa
There are tools to do it: ABBY Aligner, hunalign, etc.
They don't work very well for
Japanese or Chinese. You have to do it manually.
How to create parallel texts for
language learning – Part 1
How to create parallel texts for
language learning, part 2
How to create parallel texts for
language learning + Japanese learning tools info
http://www.farkastranslations.com/bilingual_books.php
and the tool making such texts http://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/
It might seem a little bit off
topic, but in fact it isn't.
I've just read about Daniel Tammet,
the guy who ‘learned’ Icelandic in a week.
To tell you the truth, I couldn't
stop laughing. ANYONE CAN DO IT – and in a better way, with better results.
Even me, and I am not an autistic savant, nor am I a genius (my IQ is 106, 60%
of people).
As I wrote above it's all about THE
RIGHT AMOUNT OF EXPOSURE IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME.
And enjoying the
process, of course.
I don’t know how many words there
are in Der Prozess (“The Trial”) by Kafka, I’ve never counted them. However, I
DO know that you can understand each single word in the book after thirty to
forty hours of “listening-reading”, provided
it’s done in one go, to prevent forgetting and to do the right amount of good
quality input. (Garbage in, garbage out.)
If you work on it 10 to 12 hours a
day (I can do it easily), after a week’s time (70 to 80 hours), you’re able not
only to understand what is being spoken (if it is not too technical), but
you’re in a position to speak as well, enough to be able to engage in small
talk at least.
In 70 to 80 hours it’s possible to
“listen-read” 3 to 5 average novels, and that’s quite a lot. The first one will
be a little bit difficult, but the rest will be much easier, you’ll be able to
“shadow/echo” it (= repeat after the reader) at the same time, and I DO know
from my own experience that when you’ve “shadowed” 3 to 5 hours, you can speak
as well. It does not matter if you repeat every single word, it is the amount
that counts. Taking part in a conversation means first of all to understand
what is being said to you, and if you do, you can react accordingly.
A great deal depends on the
“density” (new words per minute) of the texts you “listen-read” and
“echo/shadow”. If it’s too low, it won’t be possible for you to put across your
thoughts in a coherent way, simply your vocabulary would be too poor.
Using a language is a skill, you
can’t acquire it without practicing it. If you want to learn how to swim it’s
no use to analyse the chemical composition of water instead of plunging into
it. Water for a language learner are TEXTS: spoken and written.
10 hours a day:
It's entirely up to you. If you love
it, you'll be wanting to do it. LOVE IS A MAGIC LAMP.
I meant achieving relative
proficiency in about a week. (Ten days if you add pronunciation practice: phonematic
and phonetic listening and repeating after the recording.)
Of course, I don’t mean to say that
you’ll be as good as an educated native speaker (it takes years – cultural references and so on), but what is generally
considered ‘advanced’ (listening) and ‘(lower?) intermediate’ (speaking) is
definitely within your reach.
aYa
‘Listening-reading’
gives you
1. freedom from all sorts of crooks:
schools, teachers, textbook publishers etc
2. joy
(I’ll always remember Krashen: "The best methods are therefore those that
supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages
that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production
in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready',
recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and
comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production."
Stephen Krashen
http://sdkrashen.com/ his site, you can
download his books for FREE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqVhgSvwWYk
Krashen interviewed by Steve Kaufmann
I particularly like the “low anxiety
situations”. What about “joy and love” instead?
3. beauty: Good literature
might not be as good as ASSimil, Pimpsleur, Mumble Thomas, or Rosetta Stoned,
but it has its merits, too.
4. saves you tremendous amount of
toil, time and money (you can throw away textbooks, lessons, dictionaries,
flashcards, tests etc)
aYa
As to its components: they have all
been used separately at one time or another. Some kind of listening-reading was
done in ancient
In modern times “listening-reading”
proper (reading in your mother tongue and listening to a foreign language
recording) was used by some passionate adventurous people, I know two who discovered
it on their own.
(There’s another one. Not a long
time ago I read a post by a guy who re-discovered LR.
Then it does happen – people who do similar things tend to discover similar
methods.)
So there are at least four of us who
have done it so far. My version seems to be the most complete one, the only one
that treats language and learning as systems. And with plenty of parallel texts in many
languages.
aYa
ProfArguelles wrote:
|
(DrArguelles means Assimil handbooks
and suchlike.)
(his site: http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/
)
It's been used for years in
What makes L-R different is:
1. using long novels right from the
start in fully bilingual format, with bilingual etexts in vertical columns with matching cells, side by side on
ONE page, recorded by professional actors
2. Step 3 (= listening to the target
language while reading in a language you understand.
3. Using self-explanatory texts (= knowing the content
beforehand, both the meaning and emotionally)
4. speaking and writing only after
the incubation period, that is after getting to the stage of natural listening.
5. the Assault
(= massive exposure in a relatively short time)
6. taking into account all the
subsystems: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and
discourse (= how to produce texts), discourse in textbooks is artificial and
often wrong).
7. And that's true, it IS the
cheapest way of learning a language, both in terms of money and time.
aYa
To make it multilingual – the same
novels/books in many languages, with matching cells, and line-by-line audio
playlists.
|
+ multilingual
mouse-over pop-up (eg Lingvo12) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chapitre 1 |
Chapter 1 |
Capítulo 1 |
ГЛАВА
I. |
1. |
|
|
W głąb króliczej nory |
Dans le terrier du lapin |
Down the Rabbit-Hole |
EN |
ВНИЗ ПО
КРОЛИЧЬЕЙ
НОРЕ |
うさぎ の 穴 を まっさかさま |
|
Alicja czuła się już bardzo zmęczona tym, że siedzi obok siostry na pochyłym brzegu i nie ma nic do roboty; |
Alice commençait à se sentir
très lasse de rester assise à côté de sa soeur, sur le talus,
et de n’avoir rien à faire: |
|
Alicia empezaba ya a cansarse de estar sentada con su
hermana a la orilla del río, sin tener nada que hacer: |
Алисе
начинало
уже
надоедать
сидеть с сестрой
на берегу
без всякого
занятия; |
アリス は 川辺 で
おねえさん の よこ に すわって、 なんにも する こと
が ない ので とても 退屈
し はじめて いました。 |
|
raz i drugi zerknęła do książki czytanej przez siostrę, ale nie było w niej obrazków ani rozmów: |
une fois ou deux, elle avait jeté un coup
d’oeil sur le livre que sa soeur lisait, mais il ne contenait ni images, ni
conversation, |
once or twice she had peeped into
the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, |
había echado un par de ojeadas al libro que su
hermana estaba leyendo, pero no tenía dibujos ni diálogos. |
пару раз она
заглянула
было в
книжку,
которую
читала
сестра, но
там не было
ни картинок,
ни
разговоров; |
一、二回 は おねえさん
の 読んで いる 本 を のぞいて みた けれど、
そこ に は 絵 も 会話 も
ない の です。 |
|
„a
co za pożytek z książki – pomyślała Alicja – bez obrazków i rozmów?” text polski: tł. Robert Stiller |
«et, se disait Alice, à quoi peut
bien servir un livre où il n’y a ni images ni conversations?» |
`and what is the use of a book,'
thought |
«¿Y de qué sirve un libro sin dibujos ni
diálogos?», se preguntaba Alicia. |
«а зачем
нужна
книжка, — подумала
Алиса, — в которой
ни картинок,
ни
разговоров?» |
「絵 や 会話 の ない
本 なんて、 なんの 役 に
も たたない じゃ ない の」
と アリス は 思いました。 |
To make good and faithful
translations, no censorship, etc.
To prepare pronunciation courses.
To make interlinear word-for-word
translations for beginners.
To prepare grammar/sentence patterns
in bilingual format with line-by-line audio playlists.
Recordings of the same book by
various L2 readers/actors.
To fully computerize it.
line-by-line audio with playlists
loop any fragment for repeated
listening
built-in vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation, and example sentences pop-up with links to audio
highlighted chunks while audio
playing
and so on...
the sky is the limit
aYa
I’ve no idea if my advice will be
useful.
I can only describe how I learn
languages.
I don't use SRS (Supermemo, Anki, etc).
I learn entirely on my own.
I rely on personally relevant
massive input – audio + transcript + translation.
I need parallel texts with
line-by-line audio (.mp3) and audio playlists (.m3u).
Here's an example of the layout I
use – Core 2000 for simplicity's sake (actually, I use long texts –
novels/books (or collections of stories) I like and know well in languages I
already understand – not isolated sentences):
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/Japanese%20Core%202000%20%20example%20layout.htm
|
* |
||
|
05106.mp3 |
|
|
|
それはとってもいい話だ。 |
それ は とっても いい はなし だ |
That's a really nice story. |
|
* |
|
|
|
09011.mp3 |
|
|
|
私は絵を見るのが好きです。 |
わたし は え を みる の が すき です |
I like looking at pictures. |
|
|
<n> gate in old przełożył Mikołaj Melanowicz |
羅生門S-1.wav
|
らしょうもん |
|
|
|
芥川龍之介 |
あくたがわ りゅうのすけ |
芥川龍之介 |
|
|
One day, in the evening, |
Это
случилось
однажды под
вечер. It was nightfall. Wydarzyło się to któregoś dnia późnym
popołudniem. |
ある日の暮方の事である。S-2.wav
|
ある ひ の くれがた の こと で ある。 |
或日の暮方の事である。 |
|
a servant was waiting beneath the
Rashömon gate for the rain to stop. |
Некий
слуга
пережидал
дождь под
воротами Расемон. A servant was waiting under the
Rashō Gate for the rain to cease. Pewien
sługa schronił się przed deszczem pod sklepieniem Bramy Demonów i czekał, aż
przestanie padać. |
一人の下人が、羅生門の下で雨やみを待っていた。S-3.wav
|
ひとり の げにん が、 らしょうもん の した で あまやみ を まっていた。 |
一人の下人が、羅生門の下で雨やみを待つてゐた。 |
line-by-line audio: you can automatically
cut larger audio files with audacity.exe, it’s done very quickly
This is what I do.
1. First – listening comprehension.
1a. I read a sentence in English.
1b. I click the mp3/wav file in L2 (language
I'm learning, say Japanese). The mp3 file is looped, I don't stop listening.
I need to hear/understand:
how many words there are in the
sentence I'm listening to,
what is the grammar of the sentence,
what sounds, pitch, intonation.
For this I use the Japanese sentence
in kanji and in spaced hiragana, and a mouse-over pop-up dictionary if
necessary. Let me stress once more: I don't stop listening.
When I understand what I'm hearing,
I concentrate on kanji for a moment – I don’t stop listening, I listen and look
at the sentence written in kanji, I try to identify the components (I didn't
use Heisig, I learned all the classical bushu and their Japanese names).
And that's it for the time being –
no speaking, no reading without listening, no writing. The parallel written
texts are only there to help me with my listening,
at this stage, nothing more.
Then the following sentence – the
same procedure.
After some 20-30 sentences, I click
.m3u (the playlist link) – I again listen to the sentences I've just listened
to, in a row without stopping, I always have the parallel text ready to quickly
check, in case I forget something.
I don't memorize anything – I
concentrate on recognizing the meaning, words, grammar, sounds in the sentences
I've just 'learnt.'
Then the following paragraph. Then
the following paragraph, and so on. Until the end.
Then I start from the beginning.
This time I only listen, but always have the parallel texts ready, just in
case, to check, if necessary.
Then... another book – same
procedure.
From time to time I listen to
something new at the same level or easier and only listen to check if I
understand it 'naturally' – relying only
on what I've already learnt. If I do (and like it), I go on listening.
2. After reaching the stage of 'natural' listening to difficult texts, I
concentrate on speaking.
2a. I listen to something I
understand (meaning, words, grammar, sounds) and enjoy.
2b. I echo – I repeat after the recording.
2c. I recite
from time to time – I choose some favourite pictures to create a psychological
environment, and imagine why someone says something (I've just echoed) to
somebody else.
2d. I sometimes read something I've
just echoed, without listening this time.
2e. I sometimes write down something
I've just listened to, something beautiful or interesting.
aYa
It is about learning entirely on
your own. It is how I learn
languages.
1. get a general idea what there is
to learn – very
important. Japanese is not difficult, it is different.
2a. learn about pronunciation, learn
how to recognize Japanese sounds (phonemes, pitch accent, etc)
2b. learn kana (hiragana gozyuuon first, listen and look, learn
stroke order – it shouldn’t take more than one/two hours to be able to
recognize all the symbols)
3. get a thorough idea of how kanji
work – they are a blessing not a curse, not random strokes, learn how to
recognize 214 classical radicals and variations (they are building blocks of kanji), learn their Japanese
names, learn stroke order rules
4. learn to quickly recognize basic
conjugations (V, A-i, C copula) and sentence patterns (listen and look)
L-R
(LR, mLR) ‘(multilingual)LISTENING-Reading’:
5a. L-R native materials (if
possible)
5b. simple natural listening (even
handbooks for beginners), do natural listening as often as possible (chores,
commuting, etc)
6. L-R – concentrate on listening
through both audio, translation and J e-text
When you understand what you hear (a
passage/phrase/paragraph), concentrate for a moment on the written text: listen
(don’t stop listening, loop) and look at the J text, see if you can identify
words, grammar, kanji components; don’t try to memorize anything, if something
is too difficult, just skip it, only read the translation and listen; if you
think your pronunciation is good, you can repeat after the recording here and
there
7. get to the stage of natural
listening to relatively difficult texts
8. concentrate on
pronunciation/speaking by repeating after the recordings: listen-repeat,
listen-look-repeat, listen-look-repeat-type
9. concentrate on reading:
listen-look-repeat-type, look-listen, look-read, look-read-(repeat)-type
10. do natural listening and reading,
speak to yourself
11. listen-look-repeat-write by hand
(if you need to, or like to)
aYa
Before or together with L-R
Introduction + links to many off
line learning materials:
!0 Japanese What’s to learn BEGIN
HERE.doc
Learn kana (hiragana and katakana).
An idea about pronunciation (hatuon):
mora (a beat, unit of rhythm; not to
be confused with a syllable), long/short vowels, whispered vowels, double
consonants, pitch accent, rendaku, assimilation in pronunciation of kanji, colloquial contractions,
dialects (standard Tokyo), homophones (the rule, not an exception, that’s why
kanji are necessary; English: write, rite, right, a right, Wright)
(PLUS editions – enhanced: parallel
text, line-by-line audio playlists:)
!H Hatuon.doc (pitch accent
included)
Hiragana
First Step.doc
Katakana
First Step.doc
An idea about grammar:
no articles, no plural, no grammatical gender, no
cases, no persons, no modal verbs, no relative pronouns, no personal pronouns (=
an open subgroup of nouns), no possessive pronouns
INFLECT (change):
V (verbs); A-i (adjectives); C copula (be, never independent
word)
Don’t inflect:
N nouns; AN (adjectival nouns,
na-adjectives)
particles (josi) Particles go after what they
modify.
adverbs (a
huge subgroup of onomatopoeia)
numerals
and counters
pronouns
ko-so-a-do
conjunctions
interjections
verbs: -ru, -u, suru verbs (N+suru),
only 2 irregular: suru (do), kuru (come)
copula: de aru, da, desu, na, de
gozaru, de irassyaru
adjectives: A-i (it’s a verb: big-is,
good-is); AN (+C to form a predicate)
particles: ha(wa), ga, wo(o), no,
ni, ka, to, yo, wa, ne, etc
pronouns: plenty of I, you, etc –
they are nouns
politeness levels: plain, polite,
honorific, humble
giving-receiving
verbs: ageru, sasiageru, yaru, kureru, kudasaru, itadaku, morau
in-group ↔ out-group
male ↔ female speech
SYNTAX:
Topic-comment
structure
Predicate: V,
A-i, N/AN + C (de aru, da, etc)
predicate
always at the end of a sentence, carries tense and politeness level
The
modifier before the modified (particles after)
Particles:
1. after N, 2. between sentences, 3. after sentences (question, modal)
Nominalizers
(abstract nouns): no, koto, mono, toki, hazu, beki, tumori, etc
Sentence
endings: you da, sou da, no da, darou, koto ga aru, hou ga ii, ka mo sirenai,
rasii, etc
V-nakereba
naranai – must (lit. if don’t do V,
won’t become)
V-te mo
ii/yoi – may, allowed (lit. doing V
also good)
V-te ha(wa)
ikenai - may not, not allowed (lit.
as for doing V, cannot go)
(See Group –1 (minus one) below)
Kanji –
strokes (rules are very simple with few exceptions), bushu (classifiers, radicals), a sound note (a phonetic hint),
components, yomi (readings kun, on),
learn 214 classical radicals and their Japanese names, they’re major building
blocks of kanji
Use a mouse-over pop-up dictionary.
(Lingvo 12, etc)
!Kanji Eng.doc (basic info + links
to many off line tools)
!K Walsh.
Len - Read Japanese TodayPLUS.doc (270 basic kanji + components + links to mp3
and audio playslists – example vocab)
L-R proper:
Available materials (audio +
parallel texts):
(here only Japanese-English texts)
Group –1 (minus one)
(these are PLUS editions, much more
learner friendly than the original books – enhanced: parallel text kanji-spaced
hiragana-English, line-by-line audio playlists)
(basic grammar + vocab)
1. Hugo
Japanese In Three Months.doc
2.
Visualizing Japanese Grammar.doc
3.
Essential Japanese Verbs.doc
(4. Japanese Core Sentences 6000)
(5. 2001 Kanji Odyssey)
(6. !book2 J-English)
Group 0 (zero)
(PLUS editions)
mini-dialogues, articles, etc
1. ItiMaru
– from beginners to advanced
2. Hiragana
Times – articles, almost authentic
3. Komiks –
plenty of colloquial contractions
By educated
native speakers for native speakers:
Group 1
1. !L-R My
Book of Bible Stories SmallCells.doc ! 9h 01min.m3u8
2. !L-R
Saint-Exupery - Le petit prince.doc 2h 39min
3. !L-R
Carroll -
4. !L-R
Murray - Breaking into J literature (7 stories)
5. hukumusume Aesop’s Fables 3h 11min
6.
hukumusume Short stories of
7.
hukumusume Classical stories of the world 2h 23min
8.
hukumusume Japanese classical stories 2h 49min
Group 2
1. !L-R
Learn From the Great Teacher SmallCells.doc ! 7h 49min.m3u8 (JW)
2. !L-R
Rowling - HP1.doc 10h and !L-R Rowling - HP2.doc 11h 29min
3. !L-R The
Greatest Man Who Ever Lived Japanese-English.doc 12h 25min
4. !L-R
Stevenson, Robert L. - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde JP-EN.htm 3h 44min
5. Doyle – Sherlock Holmes Stories, 16x, about 1h each
6. The Secret of
Family Happiness 6h 38min
7. Awake!
magazines, hundreds of hours
8. Scola
InstaClass (TV news), 28h so far, they usually add 5min a week
Group 3
1. 夏目漱石Natume Souseki
1. 夢十夜 yumezyuuya 70min
2. 坊っちゃん Bottyan 4h 55min
3. こころ Kokoro 10h 40min
4. 吾輩は猫である Wagahai wa neko de aru 22h (texts J,
R, P, no English text)
5. 道草 Mitikusa 8h 30min
6. 門 Mon 10h
7. それから Sorekara 7h
8. 草枕 Kusamakura 6h
9. 硝子戸の中 Garasu do no uti (incomplete)
2. 太宰治 Dazai Osamu
1. 人間失格 Ningen sikkaku 5h 37min
2. 斜陽 Syayou 5h 50min
3. 19 stories (but no English text)
17h 26min
3. 芥川龍之介Akutagawa Ryuunosuke’s stories – 12x,
360min
4. 宮沢賢治 Miyazawa Kenji’s stories, 7x, 4h 30min
5. 小林多喜二 Kobayasi Takiji – 蟹工船 Kanikousen 3h 53min
Group 4
松尾芭蕉 Matuo Basyou – 奥の細道oku no hosomiti 1h 05min
百人一首 Hyakunin isshu 29min
源氏物語Genji monogatari (incomplete, both classic and modern)
L-R materials for
learners of Japanese:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=125567#p125567
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!L-R/
http://users.bestweb.net/%7Esiom/martian_mountain/mL-R/
The Japanese somehow don’t like
audiobooks – you’ll have to make do with what is available. But what IS
available is enough to learn well.
If L-R-ing authentic texts for native
speakers is too difficult, you might start with something graded/easier. I’ve
already prepared plenty of kanji-spaced hiragana-English parallel texts – from
elementary grammars, through dialogues for learners, newspaper articles to
novels.
aYa
Japanese dictionaries in epwing
format:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2705519
NHK nihongo hatsuon jiten [koe MP3]
[EPWING]
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1238557
How to create parallel texts for
language learning + Japanese learning tools info
Japanese-English dictionary with
audio:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?9T
Language is a system of interrelated
subsystems, grammar is one of them.
I will try to explain why I need
grammar right from the beginning.
When I start learning a new
language, there are two things I concentrate on – and I find them absolutely
essential:
1. listening comprehension (through L-R)
To do both 1. and 2. properly I need
some kind of logic behind them:
I must know what kind of sounds
there are, how they differ from the ones I already know, what phonetic features
I must pay attention to while listening, etc.
If I don't know that pitch accent is
important, or that Japanese spoken words are divided into morae (or moras, if
you prefer), or that there are whispered vowels there, then I am bound to fail
to notice them myself and substitute them by something completely different –
my L1 sounds, rhythm and intonation.
I must know what grammar features
there are, how they differ from the ones I already know.
I must know that nouns have no
gender or plural forms, that there are no articles, that the sounds -mas- carry
the meaning of some kind of a polite form, that -u is the present/future tense,
and that -ta is the past tense, that tenses are not only a characteristic of
verbs but some adjectives as well.
I'd rather know straight away that おはようございます o-hayou gozaimasu is in fact お早う御座います and that they are forms of 早い hayai and 御座る gozaru, and that there's no 'good' or
'morning' in it – and that is simply means: it is early... (usually translated
as: Good morning)
I'd rather know straight away that どうぞよろしくお願いいたします douzo yorosiku o-negai
itasimasu are in
fact forms of 宜しい yorosii and 願う negau and 致す itasu, and that 宜しい is a honorific form of 良い yoi/ii and 致す いたす itasu a
humble form of する suru – and
that it means something like this:I
humbly ask you to be kind to me. (usually translated as: Nice to meet you)
I'd rather know straight away that です desu is a
form of であるde aru and that である is made of で and the verb ある that is irregular and its negative form is ない/無いnai and that
ない is an i-adjective and no longer a verb.
I must understand straight away that
じゃない ja nai is
not something mysterious at all, that じゃ is in fact a
phonetic contraction of で + は (pronounced わ wa) and that は here is in fact a topic marker and that the
same phonetic contraction is to be found in 死んではいけない sindeha ikenai,
死んじゃいけない sinja ikenai.
Etc, etc.
Then I don't have to treat every
single expression as something completely unrelated to other
expressions/words/forms, and be puzzled all the time by something that it is
not puzzling at all but only made so by bunglers or (not so) learned morons who
write/sell language handbooks.
And that saves me HELL of a lot of
time while dealing with authentic materials for native speakers right from the
beginning. I prefer books I already love and know well.
It now should be obvious why I need
a good reference grammar with good audio by native speakers.
By the way, grammars don't have to use
artificial sentences – there are grammars that only use authentic natural
sentences. Of course, if you don't like Miss Grammar, it is your business, not
mine.
aYa
See Grammar
vs texts as well.
Learning materials
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/JCP
(Japanese)
I was amused and surprised when I
read Feynman's comment. Even I didn't find it difficult to grasp the concept of
grammatical politeness in Japanese. (Feynman didn’t, either – but he was
against the concept itself; he didn’t somehow manage to learn the Japanese
formula: BSB – bow, smile, bow. The rest is as simple as physics.)
There are two kinds of grammatical
politeness:
a) directed to the person/s you're
speaking to (addressative):
a1) you add -(i)mas- to verbs,
待つ matu (I/you/she/he/we/they will/wait,
dictionary form)
eg. 待ちます、待ちました、待ちまして、待ちましょう
a2) you add ですdesu to nouns and adjectives,
eg.
本です/でした hon desu/desita, (it) is/was a/the
book, (they) are/were (the/some) books
簡単です/でしたkantan desu/desita, (it) is/was easy
面白いです omosiroi
desu, is/are/am interesting/amusing, 面白かったですomosirokatta
desu, was/were interesting/amusing (with A-i desu shows only respect not tense)
b) directed to the person/s you are
talking about:
b1) honorific,
待つ matu (I/you/she/he/we/they will/wait,
dictionary form),
eg. お待ちになる o-mati ni naru or お待ちなさる o-mati nasaru
b2) humble (about yourself and
in-group),
eg.
お待ちする／いたす o-mati suru/itasu
There are only a few irregular
verbs.
The only funny thing about it is
that three verbs 来るkuru (come), 行くiku (go), いる（居る）iru/imasu (be) have the same honorific form いらっしゃる irassyaru.
When to use the various forms is a matter
of social judgement (and that's sometimes difficult), not a matter of grammar,
the grammar itself is surprisingly simple and regular.
aYa
I must add that, of course, you can
combine both grammatical politeness/deference categories in one verb:
eg.
お待たせしました。 o-matase simasita. Or even more
humble: お待たせいたしました。o-matase itasimasita. I do humbly appologize to have kept you
waiting. (It sounds clumsy in English, but it is perfectly natural and
short! in Japanese.)
The only surprising thing for a
foreigner in the sentence above is that there are no personal pronouns in it,
no I nor you! What's more, in Japanese, there are plenty of I and you. They can convey politeness too. And they are not pronouns, but
nouns rather. You choose a pronoun (most often you don't use any) depending on
the level of formality, age, gender, your attitude towards the listener or
person being talked about, in-goup and out-group considerations.
aYa
Smile at kanji, they will smile at you.
Kanji are necessary – a staggering
amount of homophones!
A dozen homophones for a word is far from exceptional.
Example:
しshi can be: 詩poem, 死death, 四 four, 市city, and many more.
Kanji are NOT random strokes.
Any successful strategy of learning
written forms of kanji boils down to this: a. dissect kanji into components
recurring in many kanji b. name the components and use them as building blocks
to remember new kanji c. learn stroke order rules.
Example:
黒kuro (black) in 黒澤 明Kurosawa
Akira (one of the very best film directors ever) is made up of 田ta (rice field) + 土 tuti (earth, soil)
+ 灬rekka (raging fire) {里+灬} 里 sato (village)
and 灬.
In other words, kanji have their own
‘alphabet’ – recurring elements that have their names and are easy to remember,
because they mean something and you will see them time and again in many words.
It only takes a few hours to learn all the bushu
(the recurring elements).
Some components can be a kanji on
their own, some are just parts of other kanji.
If you don’t know kanji for a word,
it’s all right to write the word in hiragana only.
Kanji are a blessing, not a curse.
They make learning EASIER, not more
difficult – à la longue.
There are two additional dimentions,
(compared with the alphabet): a picture and an idea, very often quite poetic.
When I saw 電子 (electron: electricity + child) for
the first time I knew INSTANTLY what it means and guessed how to pronounce it: でんし densi. It would not be possible to
guess the meaning, if you saw it written in hiragana or romaji. The same goes
for countless kanji. And reading: it's just like looking at pictures instead of
describing them. It's 天国 tengoku
(heaven, sky + country) – paradise.
Kanji seem difficult, but they
aren’t. They are painted poems.
I NEVER learnt kanji as single
entities. I always learnt words in texts (audio + transcript + translation +
pop-up dictionary). I never memorized anything. I relied on massive
comprehensible exposure.
I didn't learn kanji in any particular
order.
The first kanji/words I was able to
recognize (hundreds of them!) were in fact proper names (film directors,
actresses, actors, writers, models, historical figures, towns, islands), movie
titles, book titles, etc. And long before I even started to learn Japanese. It
wasn’t possible for me to confuse黒澤 明Kurosawa
Akira with 山田 洋次Yamada Youji, 宮澤 賢治Miyazawa Kenji with安部 公房Abe Koubou, 三船 敏郎Mifune
Toshirou with仲代 達矢Nakadai Tatsuya, 車 寅次郎Kuruma Torajirou withリリー 松岡Ririi Matsuoka, 網走Abashiri with 函館Hakodate, or 広島 Hiroshima with 長崎 Nagasaki!
I've always been interested in good
books and movies and have been in the nasty habit of checking the literal
meaning of the original titles.
It was a very useful stage,
emotionally.
Abashiri isn’t just a string of
sounds that mean nothing any longer, it is where Tora-san met Ririi for the
first time. I can see their faces and hear their voices. And so on and on and
on – from Abashiri to
I got used to kanji and learned a
thing or two ‘by accident’ – when I saw 黒宮 or 三島 I thought
they would be Kuromiya and Mishima, and indeed they were. I discovered pretty
quickly that kanji have different readings. I even discovered that they are interconnected
semantically – I remember looking at 天 (heaven,
sky) and it dawned on me: something big above your head. I cried for joy – a
painted poem.
I couldn’t help noticing that kanji were made of recurring components. Later, I learned what ninben or sanzui are for example, but I knew how they looked like 亻 氵 long before I got to know their names. Not because I particularly cared or tried hard to remember, it just happened. I wasn’t surprised – I already knew that learning a language HAPPENS on its own. All you need is personally relevant exposure. And... you must pay lovingly tender attention to what’s happening before your ears and eyes. If you try to ‘conquer’ or ‘annihilate’ (= memorize) a language, it will rebel – your own brain doesn’t like to be raped and turned into a slave. That’s why I didn’t care too much about ‘learn-x-kanji-in-y-days-first’ nonsense.
One sunny day I got a present from 天照皇大神 – I was
chosen.
I did some research, learned about
kanji (bushu, components, stroke order
rules), learned Japanese bushu names,
but never bothered to learn kanji in any 'proper' order or memorize any lists.
I relied on massive comprehensive exposure to texts (audio + transcript +
translation) I liked or was interested in for some reason.
I DID use some kind of a system to
remember kanji.
I learnt 214 classical bushu (they are building blocks of
kanji, I made a one-page table and printed it for quick reference).
I learnt their Japanese names. I
learnt stroke order rules – they are very easy to remember with hardly any
exceptions.
Computer etymological dictionaries
were one of my resources, too.
I didn't care about the order of
learning kanji or words/expressions, how frequent or infrequent they are. I was
interested in what a given text meant (be it the title of a movie, a whole
story or a novel). I didn't care whether I forgot or didn't forget. I was sure
to come across them again in future texts.
At first kanji were just ‘in the
background’ while L-R-ing, listening comprehension was much more important.
That doesn’t mean that I ignored kanji, they were always there smiling
playfully – one of the first things I did (after learning about pronunciation
and kana) was to be able to recognize all the classical bushu (radicals) and get to know their etymology – I just read Len
Walsh’s book and two introductions to kanji dictionaries (one in Polish and the
other in Russian).
I was slightly surprised that
learning Japanese was not more difficult than learning English, German or
French, just another language. It would probably have been more difficult if I
had started with reading and learning kanji in isolation the way Mr Heisig
recommends or just trying to read handbooks – with hardly any kanji in them, or
even no kanji at all – romaji only. How on earth can you learn kanji if you’re
not exposed to them?
And one more thing: I never found
learning languages or kanji difficult.
Some tips:
Make your kanji font really big –
you must feel comfortable, you must clearly see all the strokes and components.
Then you can make the font smaller and smaller.
Change the font – don’t get used to
one font only. It will teach you what really is important in a kanji. Kanji may
look different depending on the font.
Avoid furigana – it is much better
to rely on parallel texts (kanji – spaced hiragana) + audio as long as
possible.
Neither kana
nor kanji mark pitch accent – you’d
better listen to everything you’re learning, be it pronunciation, kana, kanji,
grammar, vocabulary or novels.
Learning materials
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/JCP
If I were to use Heisig and SRS
(Supermemo or its clones – Anki, Mnemozyne, etc), I'm sure I would rather kill
myself.
I did know about Mr. Heisig's method
of learning kanji even before I started learning Japanese. I rejected his
method consciously.
http://forum.koohii.com/
a good site for Heisig’s fans and people interested in learning Japanese in
general.
http://ankisrs.net/ Anki (SRS) site
Don’t harbour any illusions. If you
‘learn’ even a huge list of kanji (let’s say the Heisig way – 3 thousand
kanji), don’t think you’ll be able to read Japanese, not to mention listening
comprehension or speaking. You’ll know some Japanese, that’s true – 1%. (One
per cent. Or less.)
aYa
|
I might add that learning a language
is not simply the memorization of kanji, vocabulary, grammar rules or sentence
patterns; it is being exposed to BEAUTIFUL TEXTS (audiobooks + e-novels).
It follows from the above that it is
desirable to be an AWE rider and learn a language through L-R. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’
Bye.
http://i48.tinypic.com/qy7m38.jpg
aYa
Both touch typing and learning/using
a language are skills – you learn by using, not by thinking too much (making
artificial mnemonics).
You have to be aware of some basic
principles, that's all.
As far as touch typing goes:
1. you have to know how to sit and
where to put your fingers. (It takes five minutes.)
2. you only look at the screen, and
NEVER at the keyboard.
3. the rest is done by actually
pressing the keys, but not randomly:
jjj, fff, jfj, fjf, then kkk, jkj,
kjk, ddd, lll, sss, aaa, etc. You just add one new element and practise new
combinations with old elements. Then you try to type real words: sad, add, ass,
fall, all, lass, etc. NO HURRY: first slowly with no mistakes and then faster.
Your body will learn, you won't be
conscious of where to find a particular character.
If somebody asks me where 'я' is, I'll have to look for it – I
don't know, but when I have to type it, my finger knows and presses the right
key.
The same goes for kanji – there's
rules and there's tools.
1. you have to learn about stroke
order – the rules are very simple with very few exceptions.
You watch how they are written and
write them yourself.
2. kanji are made up of building
blocks; classical radicals are more or less the building blocks. Learn them –
it takes just a few hours.
Language is a system of
interdependent elements: sounds (phonemes, pitch accent, rhythm, intonation),
words (combinations of sounds that carry meaning), phrases and sentences
(combinations of words), and texts (spoken and written, combinations of all the
above). Only texts carry real life meaning and EMOTIONS.
You learn and remember sounds,
words, kanji etc, by using them (listening and looking at texts, and then
repeating after the recording and writing them).
It is THAT simple. No mnemonics are
necessary, they are just a roundabout way to get to the language.
An occasional mnemonic here and
there from time to time is all right, but to use mnemonics first and nothing
more to learn huge sets of elements (Heisig – 3000 kanji) is just a waste of
time. As someone said (a person who actually did Heisig, and then learned
Japanese to an advanced level): ‘It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – you need RtK
(Heisig’s books) to finish RtK.’
NOTE:
I am not against the way YOU learn
(fortunately, the Internet is not school, nobody can force you to learn their
way) or Mr. Heisig personally, I just said what I know works best.
aYa
Question:
''do STEP 2 AND 3 one to three times
and go on.''
Answer:
Kafka
in German – I did a page once and went on, but I understood everything –
the translation was very accurate.
Akutagawa
in Japanese – I did a sentence or a paragraph 3 times – it was my first text in
Japanese, I had no parallel texts, no word-for-word translation, no spaced
hiragana transcription, I had to use a mouse-over pop-up dictionary. The
literary translations I used (Polish, Russian, English) gave only the overall
meaning. I could recognize basic Japanese grammar and kana before I started. I
had an idea about kanji: bushu
(radicals) and components – I read the book by Len Walsh and could recognize
214 classical bushu and their
variations.
I knew the books very well, I had
read them in translation. And I LOVED them. I still do.
aYa
Question:
|
Answer:
The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R:
|
mjcdchess wrote:
|
At the beginning the written texts are
there only to help you with listening comprehension. You have to analyse what
you HEAR. You must match the meaning of what you've jut read with what you're
hearing. In other words, you must UNDERSTAND what you're listening to, though
you don't memorize anything. L-R is not mechanical. It's a highly conscious
process. At first, you don't have to understand every single word, but the more
you understand for a fleeting moment, the better. You don't read two pages
ahead. So at first, you'd probably have to stop the recording or rather loop a
fragment and listen to it a few times. If you understand a lot, you don't have
to pause, if you don't understand... pause or ... do something else instead.
Learn some basic grammar, too. That
is you must be aware that there are cases, grammatical genders, articles, etc.
You don't need to memorize any grammar rules, though.
Being aware of the phonemes and the
correspondence between the letters/groups of letters and the phonemes helps a
lot, too.
aYa on 05 April 2009
I must add this:
Mouse-over pop-up dictionaries are
very useful.
The best one is Lingvo12.
For Japanese and Chinese:
http://wakan.manga.cz/
(now it’s slightly old, hasn’t been
upgraded for some years)
aYa
Question:
When I listen-read a book,
say, in Russian, how do I know when I'm finished? Do I have to end up knowing
every word of it?
Answer:
It's difficult to say. If I do
not feel JOY any longer, I stop and do something new. Then I might come back to
it. When I enjoy something thoroughly I listen to it many times, even if I
understand every single word.
The first three to five hours
(depending on the difficulty of the text) should be translated word for word
(if you're a beginner), otherwise it is much more difficult, though not
impossible.
I hope you know about the idiolect
and how important it is. The first ten to twenty pages are almost always very
difficult, a nightmare sometimes.
It is good to have a pop-up
dictionary too.
If the base language is not your
mother tongue, it might be even more difficult, unless you know it extremely
well.
aYa
his site: http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/
[quote=doviende]
The other big reason I didn't mix my
native language with listening in the L2, was because if it worked, I'd be
totally fluent in Japanese by now! Do you know how many hours of anime I've
watched with Japanese audio and English subtitles? It's a ridiculous
number of hours, and I'm still hopeless at Japanese. I think I just tune out
the Japanese audio because I pay more attention to the subtitles.[/quote]
My (aYa’s)
comment about the above passage
Watching
movies is NOT L-R.
L-R is LISTENING-reading, that means
you must pay attention to what you’re hearing, analysing it to derive the
meaning (and JOY) out of it.
If you’re unable (or not willing, or
don’t care, or refuse, or pay attention to something else – jumping pix or big
eyes or short skirts) to LISTEN to what you’re hearing, you can spend two
lifetimes on watching anime, it won’t miraculously make you understand haiku or
pick up chicks in Japanese.
L-R is not mechanical – it’s not
something that comes in through one ear and goes out through the other, missing
your brain on the way. It requires conscious effort.
You can call a monkey Willy-Nilly
Shake Speare, but that does not mean that it will produce a single sonnet, not
to mention Hamlet, the Prince of L-R.
The written text (both in L1 and L2, preferably in parallel
vertical columns with matching chunks) is there only as an additional tool to
help you with your LISTENING. The faster you read, the more time you have to
analyse what you’re GOING TO listen to. It goes without saying that you must
remember (and be in love with) what you’ve just read.
You CANNOT read subtitles in
advance, they appear on the screen at the same time as the characters are
speaking, you have no time to pay attention to what you’re (mis)hearing, you
concentrate on what is going on in the movie. Quite often, subtitles in L1 have
very little in common with what is actually being said in L2. What’s more,
exposure (new words/sentences per minute) is very poor.
By the way, L-R (reading in L1 with
an occasional glance at L2 and LISTENING to L2) works MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better
than just reading in L2 and listening to L2. I know, I’ve done both, girls and
boys and both.
The best way is, of course, YOUR OWN
way. But it takes thinking, and people somehow usually think that they think.
It’s always worth remembering:
There are no rule(r)s.
aYa
Question:
If the Listening-Reading works,
then...
... why aren't all the people who
watch thousands of hours of Japanese anime with English subtitles fluent
in Japanese?
See My answer above and below.
Another answer:
A (not so) good question, but
there's nothing strange about it.
Watching subtitled movies is NOT L-R.
1. The viewer concentrates on the
action, the moving pix, and not on what is being said in L2 (phonemes, grammar,
meaning) s/he doesn’t give a damn to be more precise.
2. The density (new words/sentences
per minute) is minimal.
3. The language in movies is
muffled: too much background noise, too much slang etc.
4. Subtitles are very often
translated in a very careless or nonsensical way – the poorer the film/anime,
the poorer the translation, that’s a pattern. (The same goes for literature.)
5. The majority of viewers don't
read fast enough.
6. Texts for beginners should be
translated word for word or the languages should be
closely related, Italian-Spanish-French or French-English(??), for instance.
7. You should read BEFORE you hear
to have time to attach the meaning to what is being said. The subtitles appear
on the screen at the same time or after, so it's not possible. And what's more,
they usually disappear too quickly, so you can't check by reading once more.
Of course, you can learn a thing or
two from movies if you pay close attention, but even then it has nothing to do
with L-R.
People who ask the question (it
keeps popping up) seem to think/imply that L-R is mechanical. Sorry, it isn’t.
It’s a system. It’s meant for AWE
riders who are capable of learning through the Assault,
not for TV/computer games/Internet/cell phone addicts – those are extremes that
don’t ever meet.
|
aYa
|
AndreasMina:
|
If you can play the violin it might.
aYa
Question:
One more question .. do you know of
a way to prepare a parallel text that doesn't involve copying and pasting each
cell??
aYa
‘The best’ probably means ‘the best
possible results in the shortest period of time with minimum effort in a most
enjoyable way’.
For me it’s always the same:
Massive
comprehensible exposure = audiobooks + vertical side-by-side parallel texts (L2 +L1) +
pronunciation. I use books
I already know and love, if possible.
(See ‘The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R’ as well.)
aYa
By slucido:
What do you recommend to people with
near native reading skills, but basic listening skills? How can you adapt your
method to them, so that they become near native listening too?
To slucido
Polish learners of English pronounce
"love" and "laugh" exactly the same way: /laf/ – the Polish
way, and Polish /laf/ has nothing to do with English "love" or
"laugh".
Sit, seat, Sid, seed are all
pronounced /sit/ and it has nothing to do with /sit/ in English, it sounds more
like /shit/ to English ears, because /si/ is palatalized and is closer to /shi/
in English.
Japanese learners of English
pronounce "text" /tekisuto/, "love" /rabu/, "rub"
/rabu/.
Add to that your native stress,
rhythm and intonation!
When you get down to a language in a
roundabout (suicidal) way, starting from reading, you actually pronounce
everything your native way. No wonder you cannot understand when you listen to
native speakers. You have simply learned a different (non-existent) language.
I can't tell you what you should do.
I only know what I would try to do if I were you (fortunately, I am not).
1. I'd stop reading.
2. I'd do Step 2 and Step 3 of the
L-R
3. I'd learn phonetics
4. I'd repeat after good actors
reading novels I like
5. I'd start reading again (without
listening)
6. I'd listen and read separately
aYa
d-Esperanto, definitely. As some
wise guy said the only difficult language is the one you don't want to learn.
I suppose all languages are about
the same, none is more or less difficult than any other.
Gathering appropriate materials is
the only difficulty. And THAT can be extremely difficult.
aYa
I found Mandarin to be very easy
indeed. A few days ago I was studying some numbers in various languages. I
still remember four of them in Chinese: 一, 二, 三, 十. To my surprise, they were the same
in Japanese – so I killed 二 birds鳥 with 一 stone石.
aYa
I believe in
teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals. It's
the only thing I do believe in.
(E.M. Forster ‘A
Passage to
Men are born ignorant,
not stupid. They are made stupid by education. (Bertrand Russell)
'Be patient,' she said, 'and some
day you will climb your own
Another of her sayings: 'Always
expect the worst, it never happens.' She was something of a zen master, I
suppose.
Gods bless her soul.
aYa
I've never bothered whether I'm
fluent or not. I'm not. What I mean to say is that it is a problem I
concentrate on. I need to understand what people wrote in a thread, I have to
reply somehow if I think I have something to say.
I try to do my best, but I almost
always fail.
Why bother about something as
insignificant as fluency? You're getting better? All right, that's what really
counts.
Questions by Somebody (one person)
Answers by aYa
(from old emails, I slightly edited
it here and there, the questions were not necessarily asked in the order posted
here, but it doesn’t matter)
Background and questions
I'm in my early twenties, which
makes me a little impatient sometimes. I'm Chinese (Cantonese) by background
but born and raised in
Hobbies...I love investing and
thinking about money. Stocks, bonds, real estate...it is all very fascinating
to me. There is so much opportunity, and the more you learn, the more you see
things that other can't see or just fail to notice. It's a bit like being an
independent treasure hunter.
Learning style...I've always
believed in independent learning and self-teaching. In class, I would do my
homework during classtime while the teacher is lecturing on. I find that most
teachers and professors are great resources to have, but learning is mostly a
person's own responsibility. There are my books in my bookshelves about how to
learn faster and more efficiently. That's why I think I was drawn to your
"Listening-reading" thread in the forum. It seemed so efficient and
fast to me, and you know how impatient I am =)
Japanese....you might laugh but I
first decided to seriously study Japanese about two years ago. I downloaded a
preview for "Quartett", a Japanese visual novel and I thought it
looked like the most interesting story in the world. But...it was in
JAPANESE!!! So I went to my university bookstore and I bought the textbook for
the 1st year Japanese class. Then, I started playing the game and wrote down
all the text on notecards. I used an electronic dictionary to look up the words
and I began working through beginner Japanese textbook.
I was quite dumb back then so I
would to try to figure out literal translations for each word. Imagine my
frustration with the word ki. I remember looking at "Ki ni naru" and
being totally confused because I looked up ki and naru independently and
translated it as "It becomes air."
Your learning hiragana in one hour
does not surprise me. I think I learned hiragana in one day as well but it
probably took me about 4-5 hours. I just copied the vocab list from chapter one
of the textbook over and over again until i could read it quickly. I must have
written arigatou at least a dozen times or more.
I studied for about a month and
tried to work my way through Quartett. I felt like I learned a lot, but it was
too much hard work so I quit. Looking up words in a dictionary is terribly slow
especially when you are reading for story. And of course, my
listening-comprehension was terrible because Quartett did not have any voice
acting in it.
As for asking for advice... I hope
you do not feel too strange about it. I see you not as an expert, but as a very
experienced learner. Your Japanese seems to be at a very high proficiency and
I'd like to follow a similar path to get there. Upon reading your listening-reading
thread, I finally decided to start learning Japanese again.
A very amusing side effect of
learning Japanese is that I am beginning to enjoy literature again. I used to
voraciously read books when I was little. My mom says I tried to borrow the
whole children's section in the library because I read so much. I've never read
le petit prince, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm brothers,
but now I have since I started studying Japanese.
I am currently using your
listening-reading system for to learn Japanese for about 2 months
now. I have learned a lot but I do not feel like I can read/write or
speak yet. So far I have listen-read to:
Harry Potter Book 1 (9hr) – 3 times
Harry Potter Book 2 (10hr) – 3 times
Botchan (6hr) – 3 times
Sherlock Holmes stories (5hr) – 2-3
times
Kokoro (9hr) – 1 time
Here is what I have been doing.
Listened to HP1 Japanese audio while
reading the HP1 in English. I do not have a parallel text for this.
Listened to HP2 Japanese audio while
reading in English. Also do not have a parallel text for this.
I did this three times.
I know the HP stories almost by
heart since I've read them multiple times. When I listen, usually I am
reading the sentence and trying to match the English words I see to the Japanese
audio I hear.
Question: Should I read the
entire English sentence (then stop looking at the text) and then listen to the
Japanese audio? or should I constantly be looking at the English text as
I hear the Japanese and trying to match each word?
As a note, I never stop the
audio. Usually, I listen-read to about 1-3 hours a day.
After listen-reading to HP1 and HP2,
I shadowed for about 5 hours using HP2. It felt difficult because I can
only repeat short words and phrases instead of the whole sentences. I
don't think I can handle a conversation yet.
I felt like I had natural listening
for very simple texts like watching simple scenes in anime but I still can only
understand the gist and cannot understand the difficult texts.
Next, I listen-read to
Botchan. I listen the Japanese audio but only read the English part of
the parallel text. The 1st time was very difficult to follow but it got
easier with the 2nd and 3rd time.
Then, I wanted to be able to
read. So I try making and studying flashcards of the vocabulary of in
Botchan. I did this for about 10 hours. I learn a lot but I realize
it is really slow and boring.
Next, I listen-read to the Sherlock
Holmes stories. To try to learn the kanji, I would listen to Japanese
audio while trying to read both sides of the parallel text at the same
time. I would read the English sentence beforehand and try to follow
along the Japanese text as the Japanese audio is playing. This is simple
for short sentences but I lose my place very often for the long paragraphs and
complicated sentences.
Question: Should the parallel
text be done sentence by sentence or is it okay to do whole paragraphs?
What other information do you need
to know? You said to describe exactly what I am doing, but I'm not sure
if I answered what you need.
Answer
Funny feeling, I've never asked
anybody for any advice. I am just a learner, not an expert, I do not know what
anybody else should do. I can only tell you what I am doing, find out yourself
if it works for you.
You are just a cyberspace ghost, I
know nothing about you – learning is very personal.
1. Make sure you've read and thought
over what I wrote in the Listening-Reading thread. People usually oversimplify
everything.
2. I LOVE Japanese and learning, I
can learn it for days on end without getting tired, on the contrary, my joy
only increases.
3. I can read very fast in Polish
(and almost as fast in Russian, French, and English) and remember very well what
I've read.
4. I've been learning languages for
over forty years now, entirely on my own, I started when I was eight and never
stopped.
5. I've read and listened to
thousands of books in many languages.
6. I can hear different sounds
(phonemes and variations) and intonation in many languages.
7. I am ready to experiment and
change everything in my way of learning.
As to L-R.
NOW I ALWAYS use two written e-texts
and a (or more) recording.
If I do not have a word-for-word
translation (because I cannot find anyone to do it for me properly), I use a
mouse-over pop-up dictionary.
I always read about phonemes and
phonetics of the language before I start to learn it.
Listening comprehension is my
primary goal. I want to get as soon as possible to the stage of natural
listening to simple texts or sentences – even textbooks are good enough if I
can't get anything else.
I NEVER speak (or read without
listening to the text) before I reach the stage of natural listening and do
proper amount of phonetic listening (phonemes and intonation – and in Japanese
– pitch accent).
As to Japanese:
I first watched plenty of movies, I
did not intend to learn the language then.
I've read many Japanese novels in
Polish or Russian and some in Spanish, French, and English over the years. I
love good literature and try to read as much as possible.
And then one sunny day, I got six
films by Takeshi Kitano from a friend of mine. I watched them all in one day,
and decided I wanted to learn the language.
I was in a sense lucky:
I discovered what kanji are. I read
a book by Len Walsh (in Russian, now I have it in English too).
And I got Wakan (a mouse-over pop-up
dictionary) the same day.
My neighbour is a Jehovah's Witness
– and they publish Awake! in many languages (it's recorded by native speakers,
too). I asked him for some Japanese stuff – I do not mind religion as long as
it makes it possible for me to learn languages, though I'm not a religious
person, to put it mildly. I got about three hundred hours of recordings + e-texts
in Japanese and French.
I found some stories by Akutagawa
Ryuunosuke on the Internet – about 5 hours of audio + e-texts at Aozora and
some Russian e-texts at lib.ru, I had some in Polish, too.
I learned to recognize hiragana – it
took me one hour. It sounds unbelievable, but it's true. I described how I did
it in Polish in a file I posted on the forum. I just tried to see some picture
in each hiragana sign.
Just to give you an idea:
さ – I see a SAmurai with a big belly or balls
(below) and a sword (above)
あ – 69 sex, 6 below, phallus above- AAA, that's
good.
And so on, it's very easy.
What I did when I started L-R:
I read all the stories by Akutagawa
once more, I enjoy them very much.
I had no vertical parallel texts. I
had no word-for-word translation, no spaced hiragana transcription either.
I could recognize basic Japanese
grammar (I read two grammar books and made tables – cheat sheets that I
printed) and kana before I started. I knew about pitch accent and the rules how
it changes, but, unfortunately, I had no recordings of minimal pairs or even
single words, so I couldn’t hear it properly in the recorded texts.
I had a general idea about kanji –
how they work, bushu (radicals) and
components, I could more or less recognize some 300 kanji (the book by Len
Walsh and classical bushu).
I dragged an audio file into
CoolEdit, highlighted a fragment and listened to it over and over again without
stopping. At the same time I used Wakan (pop-up dictionary) for the meaning of
the words.
My first story was Rashoumon, one of
my favourite texts.
或日の暮方の事である。 was my very first sentence in Japanese. (I hope
you can see it in your browser.)
I do not know why, but I did not
find the story difficult at all. I found very quickly that kanji are a
blessing, not a curse.
I did not try to learn them at
first, just treated them as a listening comprehension tool. When I understood a
Japanese sentence (often only more or less), I listened to it a few times
looking at kanji, but not trying to learn them at any cost, and then the
following sentence. If it was too long, I divided it into smaller chunks. If
something was difficult I only got the general idea from the translation and
moved on. Up to the end. And then again from the beginning.
When something was particularly
puzzling I used a reference grammar – Kaiser, Ichikawa – Japanese A
Comprehensive Grammar (it's in English) and Romuald Huszcza,
Maho Ikushima, Jan Majewski "Gramatyka japońska Podręcznik z
ćwiczeniami" – it's in Polish, and the best Japanese grammar I've seen so far
(and I've seen dozens in many languages).
And then new texts, and constantly
listening. I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for about ten days. And after four
days I felt I was ready to speak by repeating after the recording. I did repeat
tentatively for a while, but then I felt I shouldn’t as I didn’t hear the
pitch, so I just listened for a long time (both L-R and natural listening).
After I got NHK Hatsuon dictionary and listened to words with pitch accent
marked, I discovered it wasn’t difficult to hear it any longer, so I restarted
repeating after the recording, this time in earnest.
I DO NOT TRY TO REPEAT WHOLE
SENTENCES at first – I just listen without stopping (I already understand) and
repeat a word or two here and there, then the chunks I repeat get longer and
longer, a sentence or two or even more eventually, and it's easy.
I try natural listening too, I use
just anything I can get. At the beginning I used textbooks and Miki's
audioblog.
When I understand and can repeat after
the recording, I repeat looking at the text, and then try some new texts to
find out how much I understand.
Writing:
When I can understand and repeat
after the recording, and then read without the recording, I listen, repeat and
type looking at the text I already know very well (an "old" one or a
new one, it does not matter).
Now for a few questions...
1. I feel like I've gotten to
natural listening already for simple texts like simple children’s stories. But
I'd like to get to naturally listening to difficult texts like short stories
and novels. How much study time did it take for you get to natural listening
for difficult texts?
Answer:
About sixty to
seventy hours of recorded material – that means about 200 to 250 hours
of study. I'm not sure, I did not count. (But certainly not more
than that.)
2. Long sentences popping into your
head... So far, only words and short phrases pop into my head. How long did it
take for you get to the point where long sentences are automatically just popping
into your head?
Answer:
Natural listening
+ about 3 to 5 hours of repeating after the recording,
and then recitation. By recitation I mean
remembering a sentence or two for a while (not learning them by heart), choosing
your favourite pictures and then imagining why the people in the pictures use
the sentences – and you yourself say the sentences aloud, playing the
people.
3. Learning to speak – Did you do
repeat after the recording part for all of your texts that you study or just a
few texts in the beginning?
Answer:
I only repeat something that I
particularly like. First only words, then phrases and then sentences etc. I do
not repeat whole texts (only if they
are worth it – poems or sayings for instance).
4. I'm trying to figure out how much
listening comprehension I need before going to the speaking step. I have
natural listening already but only for simple texts; not these long/difficult
novels. How much do you understand before you started repeating after the text?
In each text, there are some very easy parts and some hard parts. Should I
spend more time on listening comprehension to learn the hard parts or should I
start repeating right after I begin understanding about 50%-60% of the
sentences?
Answer:
I do not spend much time on
repeating – I prefer to listen to texts to maximize exposure. I only
repeat occasionally here and there. I only repeat something I understand fully
– be it a word or a phrase. If the meaning is not clear I do not repeat it.
That does not mean I have to understand the whole text.
5. How well do I need to be able to
listen and speak before beginning to read? When did you decide your
speaking/listening is good enough to begin the reading step for a text?
Answer:
It depends on how important
PRONUNCIATION is to you. If it does not matter, you can begin anytime. For me
it does matter so I only start reading without listening when I know my
pronunciation is good enough not to suffer from reading.
6. When re-listening to a text for one
or two extra times, should it be done consecutively? I find it's more
interesting to go on to new texts, but I will often learn more (due to
forgetting curves) if I study a single text continuously.
Answer:
If I like a text or a voice I
listen to it many times, even if I understand it completely. I do not worry how
fast or slow I learn, I concentrate on JOY. It's better than
orgasms. When I find I have enough, I do new texts.
7. How did you do your studying
since there are multiple steps and multiple texts. For instance, did you
listen, speak, read, write for a single text and then move on to another text?
Or did you listen to all the texts, then try to speak from all the texts, read
all the texts.
Answer:
I try to maximize exposure
– I can listen naturally and repeat
after the recording at the same time. I sometimes type something I like. I do
not worry about any order, what counts for me is listening and pronunciation,
the rest is less important.
8. Grammar – How and how often did
you use your reference grammar? Do you actually study from it? Or do you just
use it to look up things you do not understand when you are listening?
Answer:
At the beginning
I used them a lot. And then less and less, now I hardly ever
use them. I try to make my own grammar textbook as soon as possible. I
use texts and try to figure out for myself, when I fail I use other sources. I
usually have a look at some tables, if there are any.
Questions
Your repeating tips are very helpful
to me. I am experimenting with repeating only the word/phrases. Also, now I
just repeat the things I understand and can hear. It is much easier and joyful
this time than before when I was trying to repeat every word and full
sentences.
Questions about repeating after the reader (shadowing) and recitation:
1. When you finished the initial
stage of listen-reading and decided you have reached natural listening and are
ready to begin shadowing, did you shadow + natural listening for 3-5 hours immediately
and continuously? more specifically, is this step one long session of
natural-listening/shadowing or is it multiple short sessions that add up to 3-5
hours?
Answer:
Multiple.
2. Did you continue to practice
shadowing after those initial 3-5 hours or is it just a one-time event only in
the beginning stages?
Answer:
Continue for at lest 5 minutes
a day, every day until death. I don’t need any extra time – I do it while I
natural-listen.
3. When you say 3-5 hours, is that
time you are actually physically repeating words or is time that you are
naturally listening and repeating the words/phrases/sentences you like? For
instance, 3-5 hours of actual physically repeating words might be equal 9-15
hours of total natural-listening/repeating time. Please clarify.
Answer:
The latter. ((I meant ‘3-5 hours of
actual physically repeating words might be equal 9-15 hours of total
natural-listening/repeating time.’))
4. Recitation – Can you give more details
about this step and describe exactly how you did this? Do you mean to the play
as the people in the story, think about the scene, and then say the words while
thinking why the person speaking is using these sentences? What do you mean by
remembering a sentence vs. learning them by heart? Did you do this step while
listening to the audio or is the audio off? During this step, are you
listen-reading with the translation or just natural listening? How much
recitation did you do before being able to speak or have long sentences pop
into your head?
Answer:
You only recite when you've
already learned correct pronunciation. You choose your own pictures
(photos etc), and imagine your OWN situation, not from the story, you repeat
the same phrases, dialogues changing the people in YOUR story you've just
invented.
You remember for a while (necessary
to play your scene), you learn by heart for ever.
It does not matter if it's natural
listening, L-R or just reading.
Recitation is not so important –
it's just for fun and variety.
What really counts is listening and
repeating after the recording.
Question about Natural Listening and Reviewing
Old Texts and Allocation of study time
5. Natural Listening – In your
posts, you mention to natural listen to new materials that you've never seen
the original text or translation for. But do you ever do natural listening for
the texts after you listen-read with the translation? Is it important to do
natural listening for the texts you are studying?
Answer:
JOY is my ultimate guide. I do both.
6. Reviewing Old Texts – When you
decided you have done enough of one text, do you always go to new texts instead
or do you go back and review old texts that you studied long time ago?
Answer:
I usually do not review old texts.
EXPOSURE = NEW TEXTS, if possible.
But I do collect ‘charms’ –
‘zaklęcia’ in Polish. I mean something I particularly like: a saying, a poem, a
song, a clip from a movie, a picture, a memory – and listen or watch them very
often. They keep me going.
7. Out of 100%, how much time do you
guess you spend on each step: listen-reading, natural listening, reading,
speaking, and writing? I know you say to spend most time maximizing exposure,
but what proportion of time did you spend on listening exposure and how did you
split the time between natural-listening and listen-reading?
Answer:
At the beginning (incubation period)
L-R = 100%, then L-R = 60 to 70% (you should
remember that it involves plenty of natural listening as well, because more and
more passages are easy). After the incubation period I do everything at the
same time: listen, repeat, read, type, no rigid schedule.
Question:
I have some questions about L-R System Step 5 when you do oral
translation of parallel text from your language to the language you're learning.
1. When do you start doing this
step? When are you ready to do this?
Answer:
I first try simple
texts, but only when I've already got to the stage of natural listening to difficult
texts and after I've repeated a few hours after the recording. Then it is quite
easy and fun.
2. How much time do you spend on
this step?
Answer:
Difficult to tell, I'm not a
person who measures everything. I only do something I enjoy. The five
steps I mentioned are just an outline.
3. How exactly do you do it? Do you
try to translate just words or sentences? Or do you translate whole texts?
Answer:
I never translate words. I usually
translate passages I particularly like. And only what I know I wouldn't
be able to use myself.
4. Do you try to do a perfect
translation or just do a general idea of the translation?
Answer:
I try to do it as well as possible,
and that means at first they should be exactly as the original, then, as my
knowledge becomes greater and I can feel the alternatives, I do it in a more
free way, begin to play with words and ideas.
5. How does it fit with the other
steps – Reproduction, Recitation, and Production? Is it after you reach
production stage?
Answer:
Reproduction is word for word,
nothing new, Recitation is at first word for word, the only new elements are
your own psychological contexts, after a while you begin to change the
original, adding new words, sentences, make up your own dialogues, using what
you've already learned elsewhere and know it's correct. Production is using
what you've learned in your own real life, eg. I brush my teeth – I try to say
it, I see a happy girl, I try to describe what she feels, etc.
6. Do you use texts you are familiar
or completely new texts?
Answer:
Both. First only familiar
ones, and then new ones, but simple and that I understand fully. I try not to
guess, and always to be able to check if what I'm doing is correct.
Questions:
I tried natural listening to Niimi
Nankichi stories today, and I had trouble understanding them. I think I need to
do more listen-reading to increase my listening comprehension. More questions
for you:
1. Listening Reading Step – I remember
that you said to not just look at the translation but READ it before the
matching texts in the recording reaches your brain, and try to simultaneously
attach the meaning to what you're hearing without stopping the audio.
Can you describe more specifically
how you are doing this step? I don't think I am doing this correctly because I
am listening to the audio and trying to match the translation to the audio at
the exact same time I'm listening to the audio. This means that I am paying
most of my attention to the translation and then trying to match bits and
pieces of the audio to the translation.
Perhaps I need to do the opposite
where I pay more close attention to audio and try to match the translation to
what I'm hearing instead?
More specifically, do I need to read
a sentence in the translation, keep in your mind, and then shift 100% of your
focus to audio and listen to the sentence? during the pause before the next
sentence in the audio, do I need to read the next sentence in translation? If so,
then this requires very quick reading, good memory, strong background knowledge
of text, and close attention to the audio at the same time??? Is this what you
mean the Listen-reading is not a passive process and requires all your power of
concentration?
Answer:
To do L-R properly you must be able
to SIMULTANEOUSLY do the following:
to read the translation and at the same time
to listen attentively to the recording and at the same time to attach the
meaning to what you're hearing. In other words: Beauty is in the ear of the
beholder.
If you're NOT in a
position to do it straight away, you must slow down.
Step 1 and Step 2 are meant to facilitate
Step 3.
Step 2 in Japanese is rather tricky because
of the script. But it IS possible. Drag the audio file into Cool Edit (or
a similar proggy), highlight a fragment (a sentence, etc, depending on how much
you understand) and play it many times without stopping. At the same time use a
pop-up dictionary to see the meaning of the words if you cannot guess it from
the translation and/or what you're hearing – I use WaKan http://wakan.manga.cz/
– it's for Windows and it's free). If you have trouble with grammar, use a
reference book or try to figure it out yourself.
Do not try to remember kanji here, just
treat them as a stepping stone to understand what you're hearing. When
you come across them many times in slightly different contexts, you’ll be able
to remember them anyway.
When you've done Step 1 and Step 2 properly,
Step 3 (actual learning) should be easy. After some training you'll be able to
skip Step 1 and Step 2.
Question:
Are you trying to match
words/phrases or entire sentences?
Answer:
First the gist, paragraphs if
necessary, sentences and then words. I begin from the translation and what I
already know to get the overall meaning, but everything happens rather quickly
and it is often difficult to describe what was first – words or sentences. It
is holographic.
Question:
How much of the audio are you able
to match during your 1st and 2nd time listen-reading to a novel? I have trouble
matching because of the word order of Japanese and because sometimes the
translation is too literary.
Answer:
Plenty, 70 %, sometimes 100%, though
only for a short period while I'm listening, I do not try to "learn"
anything – that is to cram to remember. I understand for a while and I'm happy
and go on – due to the idiolect of the author and the discourse of the story
I'll be listening/reading the same words/sentence patterns, sounds, intonation
many times in slightly different contexts, so eventually I'll remember them
without cramming.
2. You said listening 3x is usually
enough to understand almost everything. Does that mean you can natural listen
to a novel and understand almost 100% of the vocab and 100% of the grammar
after listen-reading to that novel 3x times?
Answer:
Yes. But I've read plenty of
novels, poems, science books in many languages, and I LOVE what I'm doing. I need
3 times only at the beginning (incubation period). When I listen I pay
attention to everything at the same time – grammar, vocabulary, and
pronunciation. I concentrate fully on the story, I don’t force myself to learn
anything.
3. When I listen-read several times
to a novel, I find I remember the English translation very easily but do not
remember the Japanese original very well. This is very apparent when I try to
natural listen and I don't even recognize the original Japanese. Is this normal
or does this mean I am not focusing on the Japanese audio enough?
Answer:
See the beginning.
4. When you talk about the phases of
language acquisition, what does PERCEPTION and RECOGNITION mean?
Answer:
PERCEPTION – hearing and reading
(with as full understanding as possible)
RECOGNITION – listening and/or reading and recognizing
the meaning (as full as possible)
Natural listening to difficult texts
More questions:
1. Can you explain what you mean by
"natural listening to difficult texts"? I've done 250+ hours of
listen-reading (about 100 hours of material). How do I know if I've reached the
stage of "natural listening to difficult texts" yet?
Answer:
Difficult texts = difficult novels,
popular science, essays. 250+ means nothing to me as long as I don't know what
you've actually done, how much you understood listening for the first/second
time, etc. For me (I am an experienced learner/user of languages) 250+ hours
would mean enough to be reasonably fluent: to understand most of the content
and be able to use up to 5000 words in speaking and writing with a number of
mistakes in sentence structure and usage, but understandable for the addressee.
2. Speaking skills – I just finished
listening-reading to all of Miki's blog (71 entries). I listen-read to each one
two times. What else should I do to be able to "use" the language?
How long will it take to be able to "use" Japanese to communicate?
Answer:
I explained it so many times:
Using = natural listening +
pronunciation + repeating after the speaker + recitation. How much time it will
take you, I've no idea, I do not know you.
You need not only language skills to
communicate properly. You need self-confidence, pragmatic skills, not to be
afraid to make a fool of yourself, and so on. Body language is very important.
You need something interesting to say, too.
3. I've studied so much already, but
there is still so much Japanese vocabulary and grammar I do not understand.
What happens normally when learning a language? Japanese is my first foreign
language so I don't know what to expect. When are you able to read novels and
watch movies without translation?
Answer:
Learning a language (or
learning anything) is a life long experience. It's a constant struggle between
remembering, forgetting and using. You cannot say you know any language,
particularly if you only spend an hour or two a day learning/using it, and
usually in a far from perfect way. You won't be able to learn all the
vocabulary, it's an open system. As to grammar, it's usually about three/four
hundred sentence patterns to master, so it's feasible. I learned a number of
languages: was able to read novels, understand the radio and speak and write
and then abandoned them, having nothing more to read – I'm interested in poetry
and good novels, not languages. I haven't been using English for years, and
almost forgot Portuguese, for example. Now I only use Russian and sometimes
French. And Japanese.
You've chosen Japanese for your
first language, so it will probably take more time to learn it. Learning
is not as much learning a language but rather learning how to learn and
gathering materials and experience.
You seem to concentrate too much on
your goal – you want to know the language – concentrate on what’s happening
here and now. The road is much more important than the destination.
I have some questions about speaking skills and
grammar.
Speaking
Skills:
I went to
Japanese Conversation Meeting this weekend and it was very difficult to speak. I
would think of what I wanted to say in English but then I did not know how to
say it in Japanese. For instance, one person asked in Japanese, "How did
you find this group?" I wanted to say something like that "I found it
on the Internet", but my mind struggled to find the Japanese to say this.
Answer:
Speaking is
USING a language not learning it. Use something simple and modern for speaking
in social situations, you might have a try at Japanese101, their intermediate
lessons and Miki's blog are quite good for that purpose.
Question:
I have been
shadowing about 15-30 min a day for the past week and a half, only repeating
the words and phrases that I fully understand. I have been shadowing Petite
Prince and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have not done any
recitation yet. Do you have any suggestions for improving my speaking skills?
Do I need to shadow simpler texts?
Answer:
See
above.
Grammar to improve listening:
I have lots of grammar questions.
How important is it to understand the
grammar for listening? Does it make your listening-reading easier? What kinds
of things did you look up in the reference grammar and what did you skip? Do
you feel it's helpful to supplement the listening-reading with grammar? If so,
how would you do it? Most of the grammar I know is from listening-reading only.
Answer:
A language is a SYSTEM. Everything
is important. I usually read some grammar books to get the overall structure
and make my own tables, I posted an example on the forum, it's in Polish, but
you may have a look just to get an idea. Some people do not bother about
grammar – Zhuangzi, for instance. It is much better to use texts instead of
only studying grammar books, I use both because it’s faster and more reliable.
Question:
I feel like listen-reading teaches
me vocabulary very quickly but the grammar comes very slow. Many times when I
am natural listening, I understand most of the words individually but I cannot
understand the meaning of the whole sentence. How did your grammar level progress
with your listening skill?
Answer:
I get the grammar quickly, maybe
because I know how to analyse texts, I never believe grammar books blindly, I'd
rather rely on texts and my own judgment. If it's difficult for you, just do
more texts and do not worry, after a while everything should become clear. And
I study very intensively, all day long.
Now, for example I'm writing to you
in English (about something I know very well, so it’s easy) and listening to
Don Quixote in Spanish, I know the book and like the reader. It takes some time
to learn how to study and do two things at a time. I've been doing it for over
forty years, I spend about twenty days a month reading and/or listening and ten
writing on average.
aYa
Short answer: aYa
The longest answer: I'm Socrates'
daughter and Bertrand Russell's son.
WHO does not matter. WHAT matters
and HOW to improve it.
aYa
When you look at, say, 頭 or
голова, you might say it’s a symbol or a
string of symbols. They are there, they don’t disappear, you can look at them
time and again, as many times as you feel like it. It doesn’t matter who has
written them, they will look the same all the time. You may wonder how they
sound like and what they mean.
When you hear them, however,
everything changes. First, they disappear almost immediately, second, it does
matter who says them: depending on the intonation and the sounds, you can tell
a number of things: if it’s a child, a woman, a man, old, young, native speaker
or not, happy, sarcastic etc. They will sound differently each time they are
pronounced. You might wonder if they are words or a group of words or what they
actually mean and how they might look when written down.
To be able to recognize them you
must have their image in your own brain. Both acoustic and graphic.
They have something in common: the
meaning. How to covey it? You might use an actual object and say pointing: This
is頭, it
means голова. Then you might guess the
meaning, but will you remember it and recognize it the next time you hear or
see it?
Will you recognize them in
ломать
голову or 頭が悪い – you might if you see them, but
when you hear them? And not on their own but in a (con)text?
And what about using them yourself?
And if it’s not only one word but
thousands of them?
One of the solutions might be to
learn some pairs by heart, a word or a phrase and their meaning(s) in your
mother tongue.
It is the most common way of
tackling the problem.
Some questions arise:
Do the meanings in both languages
really correspond to each other?
Do you use a dictionary to find out
the meaning? Which meaning(s) do you choose and why and which ones do you
discard and why? How much time does it take to find them and write them down?
What do you actually do while
revising?
Do you listen to them or/and look at
them and/or say them aloud? Do you write them?
How can you be sure you pronounce
them correctly? Will others understand you? Will they be puzzled? Laugh at you?
(native speakers)
How much time does it take? Is it
enjoyable?
Do you learn something interesting
as well or just the words?
What about forgetting?
Is it possible to learn language
skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) that way? How well?
Won't you have to unlearn what
you've "learned" but are unaware of it?
aYa
I'll try to explain what I mean in
my rather clumsy English.
The trouble with language textbooks:
1. The authors (or should I say the
publishers) are driven by auri sacra
fames, ie. they want to make money
that's why the textbooks are
prepared quickly and cheaply.
a) they're boring
(nothing interesting can be done quickly – unless you're quick-witted)
b) they're not
meant for intelligent people
2. They want to TEACH you, that's
why they're TEACHER-centred (the teacher tells/forces his pupils to buy
textbooks – and it is big money), and the teacher is supposed to be cleverer
than you are, they tell you, "Do this, this and this". Why you should
do this "this" is not explained.
3. They tell you, "You are sure
to learn the xYx-language" using MY textbook". What they really mean
is: "Buy my textbook, whether you will learn anything or not I do not
care, it would be better if you didn't, then you'll have to buy another
one".
4. They want to TEACH you (instead
of LETTING YOU LEARN) everything at once (speaking, reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary)
right from the beginning ending up not teaching you anything properly.
PRONUNCIATION (= phonemes, intonation, rhythm, tones) is not mentioned at all.
5. What they really teach you:
a) clumsy ways of studying
b) some illusions
c) an appalling number of
pronunciation mistakes
6. EXPOSURE (texts, sentences,
vocabulary) is minimal and very often NEGATIVE (too poor and artificial
discourse for instance)
7. Usually they are not bilingual
(ASSimil's ones are)
8. If they are recorded, there's no
transcript (Pimpsleur)
9. Grammar examples are not recorded
A GOOD textbook should explain to
you:
2. the overall STRUCTURE of the
language in a logical and meaningful way: a few hundred carefully selected
sentences with word-for-word translation and grammar codes alongside with
correct natural sentences in your mother tongue
3. all examples should be recorded
by at least two native speakers – a male and female professional voice talents
And only then:
4. should contain natural dialogues
and texts with about 3 thousand basic words, all bilingual, and natural audio
by native speakers
aYa
I'd rather have a dry wit than be
dry as dust. It's a matter of time rather than wits. I cannot afford to wait
five years to read a novel, I want to do it straight away. I've never been
interested in languages, tinkering with them, or playing with the idea of
becoming a polyglot, finding it rather futile.
I have nothing against textbooks or
anyone in particular, if you're happy with them, be happy. My idea of happiness
is simply different. Not better, not worse, my own. I do not expect anyone to
be happy my way. I'm not filled with missionary zeal, the only mission I'm
aware of is the mission-ary position.
As I said before, I don't mind
courses. My favourite being INTER-COURSE.The
best way of achieving fluency in any language. Put your tongue into practice.
And your first favourite organ (no, I don’t mean your head).
It would be
unfair to say that ALL textbooks are a waste of time. I've seen a few worth
reading. Perhaps they are for the happy few, but....
Here are some
texts from a textbooks for beginners learning English. They are by Leon Leszek
Szkutnik (thanks, sensei).
|
aYa
|
fanatic
wrote:
|
||
|
(fanatic is a great fan of Assimil
handbooks) fanatic
wrote:
|
It's only licentia poetica.
You cannot impose anything on
anybody on an Internet forum.
It changes drastically when you go
to school – here you have nothing to say. Poor kids.
By the way, I did find out that
language courses would hinder my fluency if I used them. The main reason was
boredom. They don’t mention PRONUNCIATION, or do
it in a very clumsy way.
aYa
I don't memorize wordlists, but I
occasionally make audio playlists with words and expressions from the texts I'm
reading.
I have a rather huge database of mp3
files that look something like this (just an example):
三宝 【さんぼう; さんぽう】 (n) 3 treasures of Buddhism Buddha,
sutras and priesthood.mp3
共和国 【きょうわこく】 (n) republic; commonwealth.mp3
前住所 【ぜんじゅうしょ】 (n) one's former address.mp3
力を注ぐ 【ちからをそそぐ】 (exp) to concentrate one's effort (on
something) .mp3
I use wList (a proggy) to generate Unicode
playlists, and then listen to them if necessary.
I save the playlist in a file, eg:
!How to be happy.m3u8
A good thing about a playlist is
that you can edit it quickly, randomize the order, etc.
I can use wList to generate text
files, too. I change them to vertical parallel columns with a hyperlink to a
playlist.
|
全人 |
【ぜんじん】 |
(n) saint; person well-balanced morally
and intellectually.mp3 |
|
全人生 |
【ぜんじんせい】 |
(n) the whole life.mp3 |
I don't really know how many words a
day I learn, I've never counted, never bothered in fact. In a word: plenty.
Playlists are much more useful (for Japanese
and Chinese indispensable) for line-by-line audio links to texts, dialogues or
sentences at least.
Playlists are very useful for
practicing pronunciation, both phonematic/phonetic listening and reproducing
(repeating after the recording).
aYa
grammar vs texts
There's no contradiction.
I relied on authentic texts mostly –
listening and reading (through L-R)
knew L1
grammar (phonetics, verbs, nouns, etc, clauses)
first read target texts in L1, used
the same novels/books to learn new languages
studied intensively,
12-16 hours a day for two weeks – one month, on holidays
then only used the languages (great
fan of audiobooks, poetry and movies)
always studied phonetic systems very carefully
Never memorized vocabulary, learned
through natural exposure to recorded and written texts.
Examples:
Russian – no grammars (I already
knew Polish)
French – read two grammars, then
started reading Simenon's crime stories
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
English – no grammar (I already knew French)
German – read two grammars, made
tables for reference, started with The Trial by Kafka
Japanese – read two grammars – made
my own tables, printed them for reference (verbs, A-i adjectives, copula,
sentence endings)
learned kana and read about kanji
(Len Walsh, classical bushu and components)
started with authentic texts –
Akutagawa's stories and JWitnesses stuff, used a mouse-over pop-up, had no
parallel texts at the beginning
Started speaking only after reaching
natural listening – through repeating after the
recording and recitation.
Never separately learned how to
write – through exposure (exception Japanese, typed in plenty of texts –
listened (looped a fragment) – looked at the text and typed in, sometimes
repeated aloud, can touch type quickly)
Learned all my languages entirely on
my own.
See About
grammar as well.
aYa
I somehow cannot grasp why speaking
about nothing in particular should be difficult. I'd say thinking is much more
important. It's the most underrated language skill.
It often takes thinking to do things
properly, and the majority of people are not prepared to think systematically,
they usually think they are intelligent (they are, that’s true, no sarcasm
intended) or experts and that they think properly.
Let me explain. When I was beginning
to learn English on my own, I was a teenager, the first thing I did was to read
two thick books on English phonetics by university professors (real professors
– the elite, not doctors). The books were all right, they explained everything:
vowels first, then consonants.
After each sound was explained there
were exercises, for example:
look – Luke, bit – beat, etc.
I was supposed to practise /u/ sound
or /i:/ sound. It went like this: Listen and repeat.
It didn’t make any sense to me. Why
on earth was I to ignore /l/ and /k/ sounds? They were covered much later in
the book. So, of course, I didn’t repeat anything. I read the two books, made a
system for myself – I knew everything about each sound and all the sounds and
how they differed from the Polish sounds. I then started to listen and analysed
all the sounds and tried to repeat only when I was sure I heard what was
described. To control myself I relied on what I knew, what I heard and compared
what I said with what I heard (and used a mirror to see if my lips were in the
right position – there were photographs in the books). If I repeated correctly
I went on repeating it, many times, it went like this: listen-repeat,
listen-repeat, listen-repeat. But if I couldn’t repeat or didn’t repeat
properly – I just listened and repeated only the words I could repeat before.
The moral: don’t trust
unconditionally any experts or don’t consider yourself an expert – THINK, damn
it. Anyone can be right and anyone can be wrong any time.
aYa
I discovered L-R myself when I was a little girl. I went to
school and learned all the letters and... started to read a HUGE book (it was almost
two hundred pages long, with hardly any pictures). It took me two or three
weeks, I was extremely pleased. Just then L-R was born, but I didn’t know it
YET. (Use LONG novels right from the outset: L-R – STEP 1.)
A year later, I started learning
languages entirely on my own.
I noticed that if I had first read a
story in Polish and then listened to it on the radio in Russian I was able to
understand almost every single word. (L-R – almost STEP 3)
I discovered STEP 3 proper (listen
L2 + read L1) later, but basically, it’s just a much quicker version of Step 1
and Step 2 combined.
My independence journey had started
– I never stopped reading. Read during classes, some teachers did not mind,
some were afraid to tell me not to – I was quite cheeky, in an intelligent way.
Began learning Russian just because my elder brother started it at school and I
was curious. Read books, listened to the radio. Then French, I met a man who
had 333 crime stories: Simenon, Chase etc. Read them all. Then Italian, Spanish
– just because there were some books at our local bookstore and I had enough
money to buy them (pity there was nothing in Japanese, damn it!). Learned
Portuguese because I wanted to read Bertrand Russell, there were no books by
him in English in the library, but strangely enough more than twenty in
Brazilian Portuguese. And so on.
Always wondered at ignorance of
teachers.
Was I a genius? NO! I just wasn’t
afraid to do things my own way. And I didn’t waste as much time as others did.
By the way, my IQ is 106. A
childhood joke comes to mind. I would greet my best friend, Ania (we agreed
that our birthday was everyday):
– Sto lat!
– Sto sześć!
– Czemu sto sześć?
– Przeciętny wiek osłaaahaha!
Le vert paradis des amours enfantines!
You don’t understand? Learn foreign
languages, girl or boy or both.
For some time I was an unofficial
coordinator of home schooled children and teenagers – they were free, brave and
clever enough not to go to school – and it was then that I thought the whole
matter over and wrote some notes (“book”)
on L-R for the children to use as a guide. I
made plenty of parallel novels for them too.
Languages have never been important
to me in themselves, what I really like are stories (told, written, and shown)
and poetry. The fact that I know a little bit about languages and learning them
is just a byproduct, a bonus, as it were (or sometimes a burden – when I’m
forced by my weird sense of duty to write about it for others to enjoy the
beauty of it). I don’t consider myself an expert. Firstly, because I don’t
believe in any experts, secondly, if you think you’re an expert, you’re dead,
you stop thinking. I’m just a learner. I’m not a polyglot nor a performing
monkey, either. I do not give a damn if I forget a language: if I have nothing
more to read in it, I abandon it as soon as possible. I can relearn it quickly,
if needed.
The moral: it’s never too early to
start thinking.
aYa
I'm puzzled. There are so many
people out there who are sure something does not work just because they believe
so.
It reminds me of a guy who told everybody
his wife could not cheat on him. Then, some sunny day, she told him she was
pregnant. And then he did know that the impossible was possible.
The moral:
Love thy neighbour and don't tell
him the possible is impossible just because you can't get it up.
aYa
Rule One
when dealing with other people’s ideas:
- what's
good?
- how to
improve?
- how to
help others?
|
People usually start to look for
what is wrong (or rather seems to be wrong to their twisted minds) to feed
their complex of superiority (because of their complex of inferiority)! And
quarrel endlessly about trifles.
aYa
There's levels.
And there's rules, too.
Rule One: there are no Rule(r)s.
Rule Two: L-R.
Rule Three:
|
LEVELS
(English literature or translated
into English)
0
Didactic texts: simplified readers:
Oxford Bookworms, etc
If you're a good learner and a good L1 reader, you can skip this level.
1
Authentic texts: The Little Prince,
Winnie-the-Pooh by Milne, Andersen, Dahl (for children),
2
Crime stories – Christie, Sherlock
Holmes
Fair stood the wind for
3
Some more difficult popular stuff
(Ellis Peters)
Orwell 1984, Wilde, Kafka
4
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by
John Fowels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles Faithfully Presented By Thomas Hardy,
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Anna Karenia, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller,
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, Lolita by
Vladimir Nabokov, Proust, Ulysses by James Joyce
5
Poetry
Old literature – Fanny Hill, Milton,
Willy-Nilly Shakespeare
Of course, L2 version is not always
faithful to the original, that's why you should constantly use your second
favourite organ (head) and some tools: parallel e-texts, a a mouse-over pop-up
dictionary, a reference grammar, and CoolEdit or Audacity for your audio files.
You’ll probably need a new incubation period when jumping to a higher level.
A wise guy (my un-humble self)
begins at the end: 'Lolita' is my number one. It requires more drive and power
of concentration, but you’re much sooner on the top of the world. It’s worth
it.
aYa
Andersen's Fairy Tales
Saint-Exupéry – Le petit prince
Dahl – Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda
Carroll –
Milne – Winnie-The-Pooh
Wilde – Fairy Tales
Collodi – Pinocchio
Lindgren – all her books for
children are easy and nice
Spyri, Johanna – Heidi
Anne Frank – The Diary
Kristof, Agota – Le grand cahier
Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea,
Short Stories, A Farewell to Arms
Steinbeck, John – The
Lampedusa – Il gattopardo
Eco – Il nome della rosa
Orwell – 1984, Animal Farm
Bulgakov – Master and Margarita
Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment,
The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot
Айтматов
– Пегий пёс,
бегущий
краем моря
Tolstoy – Anna Karenina, War and
Peace
Kafka – The Trial, The Castle, Short
Stories
Hesse, Hermann – Der Steppenwolf
Camus – The Outsider, La peste (The
Plague)
Simenon – Maigret (various books)
Voltaire – Candide
Laclos, Pierre Chaderlos de – Les Liaisons
dangereuses ou Lettres
Nabokov – Lolita
Conrad – Lord Jim
Heller – Catch-22
Cleland, John – Fanny Hill
Maugham, W.
Kesey, Ken – One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest
Cela, Camilo
José – La familia de
Pascual Duarte
Márquez – Cien años de soledad
Guimarães Rosa, João –
Grande Sertão
Amado, Jorge – Tieta do Agreste
Amado, Jorge – Gabriela, cravo e
canela
Vasconselos, José Mauro de – Meu Pé de
Laranja Lima
Carolina Maria de Jesus – Quarto de
despejo (diário de uma favelada)
Kapuściński, Ryszard – Heban
Lem, Stanisław – Solaris
Abe Kobo – The Woman in the Dunes
Murakami Haruki – South of the
Border, West of the Sun
Murakami Haruki – Kafka on the Shore
Russell, Bertrand – The Problems of
Philosophy
Russell, Bertrand – Sceptical Essays
Russell, Bertrand – History of
Western Philosophy
Davies, Norman –
Fromm,
Erich – Escape from Freedom
Hayek,
Friedrich August von – The Road to Serfdom
It is also a good idea to use
different translations of the same novel in one language: I used four different
English translations of The Trial by Kafka, for instance. And different
recordings of the same novel in one language, unabridged ones and then abridged
ones or/and radio adaptations.
aYa
Audiobooks are very easy to get in
English, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, German, French, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian,
Belarussian, Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch (I mean by
professional readers),
not so easy in Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian – by they are there.
For lesser languages or the
countries where they don’t produce audiobooks for some reason (Korean) you have
to make do with JW audiobooks
and magazines in oh so many languages.
Search libraries for the blind and p2p networks.
There are free audiobooks read by
amateurs out there, too: librivox, liberliber.it, litteratureaudio.com, etc – I
somehow cannot listen to them, too poor technical and artistic quality. But
sometimes you just have no choice.
It is highly subjective what voices
you like or dislike.
German:
Gert Westphal (Kafka, anything by
him is very good)
Manfred Steffen (Andersen, Grimm, Mann)
English:
Jeremy Irons (Lolita)
Miriam Margolyes (Oliver Twist,
Matilda)
Peter Whitman (Catch-22, Breakfast
at Tiffany's)
Bonnie Hurren (The Bell Jar)
Cyril Cusack (Monsignor Quixote)
Cora McDonald (
French:
Anything published by Livraphone is
very good.
I liked the way Eric Herson-Macarel
reads Le grand cahier by Agota Kristof. The book is a very simple masterpiece.
Albert Camus reading his own
L’Étranger
Russian:
There are plenty of good Russian
readers, and... there are plenty of not so good. The audiobook market is huge.
Семён
Ярмолинец – he is a
genius, he reads:
Hemingway, Ernest – The Old Man and
the Sea (Старик и
море)
Платонов,
Андрей –
Котлован
Japanese:
Not too many audiobooks, I’m afraid.
You have to make do with what you find.
Kaseumin (Kasumi Kobayashi) – she is
an amateur reader, but her sad voice makes you shiver.
Saint-Exupéry –
Le petit prince あのときの王子くん read by
sarasouju (another amateur reader) kept me entranced.
Stories produced by fantajikan are
all good.
Watanabe – the guy who reads Kokoro
by Natsume Soseki is good.
My Book of Bible Stories (by JW) –
read by a very nice male voice.
There are two Harry Potter books by
a professional reader, he is quite good, but the book is...
Books by kotobanomori, privatebank,
mioradi are all very good.
The guy who reads Sherlock Holmes
stories and Dr Jekyll is good.
Spanish:
Not so many audiobooks in Spanish.
Warning: There are plenty of ‘audiobooks’ read by computer voices.
Cela reading his own ‘La familia de
Pascual
Some available audiobooks:
Saint-Exupery – El principito
Camus, Albert – El Extranjero
Kafka – Varios
Tolstoy, Leo – Ana Karenina ! 40h 22min
Falcones, Ildefonso – La catedral del mar
Zafón – El juego del ángel
Cervantes – Don Quijote de
Márquez – Cien años de soledad
Vargas Llosa, Mario – Conversación en la
catedral (poor reader)
Vargas Llosa, Mario – La fiesta del Chivo
! 17h 35min (poor
reader)
Vargas Llosa, Mario – La guerra
I have plenty of popular books, too.
They are much easier. The longest ones are:
Follet, Ken – Un Mundo sin fin
Follet, Ken – Los pilares de la tierra
Polish:
Anything in the Library for the
blind is good.
Zapasiewicz and Olbrychski are
outstanding.
JW
These audiobooks are worth trying,
good enough for mL-R:
My Book of Bible Stories
Learn from the Great Teacher
The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived
The audio and etexts: http://www.jw.org/en/publications/
(parallel texts here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/)
aYa
ignore that language is a system of interdependent subsystems
ignore my mother
tongue
ignore pronunciation
ignore listening
comprehension
ignore literature
ignore audiobooks
ignore Love, Joy, and AWE
ignore ASSAULT
ignore p2p and cyberspace ghosts
‘learn’ during sleep (nonsense, and
there are people who still fall for it!)
memorize wordlists, huge kanji sets
(Heisig) – SRS, etc
memorize dictionaries (I know two
guys who did it!)
take classes
learn to read first, ignoring
listening and pronunciation
start ‘speaking’ from day one
use Mumble Thomas, Rosetta Stoned,
Pimplseur and suchlike
go to a country to learn a language
with zero knowledge
start listening to a text and try to
get the meaning by repeated listening to the same text
shadow à
learn a little bit every day for
years
L-R mechanically without
understanding
In a word, I’m against any brute
force learning.
|
Couldn't agree more. That doesn’t
mean that all methods or people are equally efficient.
Some are wise, some are
otherwise.
I'm not Everyone's spokesperson, so
feel free to get offended by what I'm going to say.
I have nothing against Mumble
Thomas. I must say it is quite a feat to teach some broken French to a bunch of
teenagers with low language self-esteem. All that during nine hours only,
fortunately.
Nothing's wrong with spreading
nonsense.
If people stopped spreading
nonsense, nothing intelligent would ever come into being, the Internet would
soon collapse.
Nonsense can be entertaining, to say
the least (vide Ziad Fazah or rather
people’s reactions, I have nothing against the guy, let him be the greatest if
he thinks so).
Nothing's wrong with arguments.
People argue about anything. Some say black is white, some say white is black.
And I believe them.
(They do sincerely believe in what
they say, no need to doubt their intentions. Of course, they’re sometimes too
mean to mean well.)
I have nothing against polyglots,
either. Some of them know twenty languages, but, unfortunately, have nothing to
say and keep saying it very loudly.
(A polyglot: A guy who tells you he
knows twenty-three languages and you believe him.)
I do find language fora useful.
Generally speaking, I don't believe
in General Discussions (I DO believe in sharing resources). Everyone has
something interesting to say about languages they haven't learnt.
I can learn how not to learn
languages from most of the posts, and that's very positive negative knowledge.
A (language, p2p, etc) forum is an excellent
meeting point. PMs (personal messages, if there is such a possibility) are
wonderful, the best thing under the cyber space sun. Homage to all the admins
and posters out there.
aYa
|
When I was a child, they taught me letters (in L1) and I just took
the biggest book in the library (200 pages long) and started reading it. It
took me two or three weeks to finish it.
It was the greatest discovery about
learning a language I have ever made.
When I was a teenager, I took a novel
in French, it was Les Exilés (Liebe deinen Nächsten) by Remarque, and I just
read it. I understood maybe one third of it, but I do remember the joy I felt.
As to ‘Exposure comes before knowledge, not after’.
Basically, I agree, but I wouldn't
be so sure about it. It is always a good thing to know something about the
language: phonemes, correspondence between phonemes and letters, some basic
grammar features, word order. I am even inclined to think that it is
indispensable to really learn a language quickly and properly.
On the other hand, with appropriate
materials you can understand (almost) everything the first time. That means
parallel texts in vertical columns, a good translation and a good reader. And
you just LISTEN to L2 and read the L1 text with an
occasional look at L2. For me, it worked even with Japanese.
So, really, why waste your time and
read something you only imperfectly understand, when you can maximize your
exposure by understanding almost everything the
first time you grab a novel?
aYa
To people
who know Polish.
Could you
please comment on the difference between these two sentences:
1. Czy siostry Radwańskie* wielkimi patriotkami są?
2. Czy siostry Radwańskie są wielkimi patriotkami?
*famous tennis players. Agnieszka and her father are known for their
right-wing views.
(Both
questions mean more or less: Are the sisters great patriots?)
If you get
the difference, I am sure you know Polish.
A hint:
"Dlatego, panowie, że Słowacki wielkim poetą był."
(Because, gentlemen, Słowacki
was a great poet.)
|
"Dlatego, panowie, że Słowacki
wielkim poetą był." is not incorrect, it is unusual and perfectly
expresses what the author (Gombrowicz) wanted to say. So perfectly that it just
became so famous that anyone even remotely educated knows what it is all about.
It is highly ironic and I might say
even spiteful.
I posted the quote because it
explains the first question:
1. Czy siostry Radwańskie wielkimi patriotkami są?
(Are the
sisters great patriots?)
It is the title of a newspaper
article. When I read it I thought that it in a nutshell illustrates what knowing
a language is. It is not only about a language itself, it is about cultural
references as well, or even more so.
An explanation for people who don't
know Polish:
Są (they
are) is a form of być (to be), był is the past tense, masculine gender
(he was).
When the author of the article chose
the question: Czy siostry Radwańskie
wielkimi patriotkami są?, she set the tone, as it were.
Anyone interested in
Some people in
The question ‘Czy siostry Radwańskie wielkimi patriotkami są?’ might equally mean:
1.
Czy Lech Kaczyński wielkim prezydentem był? (Was LK a great president?)
2.
Czy Jarosław Kaczyński wielkim premierem był? (Was JK a great prime minister?)
3.
Czy Jarosałw Kaczyński wielkim prezesem jest? (Is JK a great party leader?)
4.
Czy Roman Giertych wielkim ministrem edukacji był? (Was RG a great minister of education?)
(Giertych, an infamous right-wing
politician, was the Minister of Education in Jarosław Kaczyński's government.
Giertych replaced Gombrowicz’s books in the school curriculum with those by a
true Pole – Dobraczyński, a third rate writer. Gombrowicz, on the other hand,
was one of the greatest writers of the XXth century, not only in the Polish
language, almost as great as Franz Kafka or James Joyce, if you can compare masterpieces
at all.)
So there you are.
Never underestimate the power of a
small word in an unusual place in a sentence. It may be a stumbling block for
many a true polyglot.
To make the topic somewhat more familiar to an English speaker.
Let's have a look at the proverb:
Curiosity killed the cat.
If you didn’t know English well
enough, you might think that it means: A Big Shot called Curiosity shot the cat
and killed it on the spot.
If you saw it spelt like this
‘Curiosity killed the Kat’, you might think that it is a spelling mistake, cats
don’t like to be spelt Kats in English.
But if you knew that The Kat refers
to a person called Billy Kat, the spelling would be all right, it might even
remind you of Billy the Kid, the famous gunman and killer of many aristocRats.
So ‘Curiosity killed the Kat’ might
sound either rather amusing or even frightening, depending on the situation.
aYa
1. Everything you’ve done or haven’t
done ever since you were born influences how enjoyable or miserable, fast or
painfully slow, your learning will be.
2. Publishers are there to sell you
their products, however poor they are. They don’t give a damn whether you learn
anything.
3. Schools, universities, teachers
are there to make their living, not to teach you.
4. Start here and now and keep
going. If you don’t know what to do, do anything that seems sensible and
improve on the way. Never consider yourself an expert, you’re bound to fail.
5. So... you’d better follow Miss
Hopper who likes to be done good and proper.
aYa
1. Delayed recitation in L1
You read a passage ONCE and recite
it from memory word for word.
You read another passage once and
recite it from memory word for word AND then recite passage 1 and passage 2,
word for word (without reading),
then passage 3, and passage 2 + 3,
and passage 1 + 2 + 3 and so on.
You don’t learn anything by heart.
When/if you make a mistake even once while reciting, you stop and go on reading
another passage – that will be your new passage 1.
You can start with short passages,
even words.
2. You look at an object/picture for
a minute and then draw from memory what you’ve just seen with as many details
as you can remember (doesn’t matter if it’s ‘artistic’), start with something
very simple.
3. You have TWO hands – write, draw
and do other things with the other hand, too. Does Not matter if it is clumsy
at first.
4. You can’t touch type yet? What
are you waiting for?
And use keyboard shortcuts instead
of the mouse.
aYa
Of course, I did not invent writing
on the wall. Neither did I invent audiobooks. My Granny did.
Parallel texts were used in the
antiquity and multilingual parallel texts were most certainly used by Komensky
(1592-1670).
Ancient Jews taught their children
how to read by using memorized Torah sentences.
They couldn't use e-texts with
pop-up dictionaries and audio. It simply didn’t occur to them.
As far as I know nobody used long
bilingual novels + audio for self-taught zero beginners.
It doesn't matter who did what, what
really matters here is HOW and how to IMPROVE it.
The most important thing is how to
make more parallel texts with matching audio and how to share them.
aYa on 27 March 2009
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of
beauty.
(V.N.)
L-R
works perfectly for anyone reasonably literate. If you're a good learner, I
mean a good learner in general, not a learner of languages (they tend to be
very poor learners for some reason), you should have no trouble with it.
It's very easy for closely related
languages.
It's relatively easy for
intermediate learners (= 2 to 3K words and some basic grammar) of any
languages.
It's rather difficult (or rather it
takes slightly more time at first), but not impossible, for unrelated languages.
A rule of thumb:
if you enjoy Mumble Thomas, Rosetta
Stoned, Pimpsleur, it won't work for you.
if you enjoy Assimil, it might work
for you.
if you enjoy good literature, it will work for you.
One more thing.
I've never wanted any followers,
money, You-Tube fame, perfect academy, etc. I only share what works for me and
some other crazy people.
If you were Mr. Martian Machine and
only saw crawling soldiers on a battle field, you'd scientifically prove human
beings can't walk, let alone love one another.
aYa
Phi-Staszek
aYa
(綾
and 彩)
Awe Rider 死を想って生きる Ona patrzy i się uśmiecha,
atamagaii頭が好い,
turaisiawase辛い幸せ, happy-go-lucky Miss
Hopper, AniaR, buonaparte, durak,
Грибоедов, inuinu, now
and Zen, adream, Zenon Kawafis,
nikoniko, namida, Uśmieszka, Puchatka, Mokrzyczka, まちぴんか, Waremechan,
Moniche, ComeAndSeeAndCome, harugakita, akinokaze, SmileLick, У
меня есть
всё, RenAi恋愛, 和姦WaKan, 春夏秋冬,
KaRen (花恋), 驚嘆する心, My Granny, いろんな自分になると面白いから.
HOMAGE to:
Bertrand Russell,
Amaterasu, Tora-san, ZatouIti, Jim Breen,
LG Maluszka Volte,
and so many cyberspace ghosts whose names/nicks I don’t remember – forgive me.
http://lr.learnlangs.com/lrwiki/Complete_gratis_legal_LR_material
http://www.farkastranslations.com/bilingual_books.php
and the tool making such texts http://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/
Examples of literary texts for zero
beginners.
To download:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/ai.7z
It's one 7z file, 3.34 MB. It's
packed. To unzip it use 7zip or WinRar.
http://www.7-zip.org/
(it's free).
The file contains:
L1
Polish, L2 French
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupery – FP Le petit prince 3
kolumny.pdf
Word-for-word translation with
grammar and pronunciation notes.
L1 Polish, L2 German
Grimm – Rotkaeppchen (t_um
interlin.doc
Word-for-word translation with
grammar notes.
L1 Polish, L2 English
Carroll – A-Pd-gr Alice in Wonderland kody komorki.pdf
Word-for-word translation with
grammar and pronunciation notes.
L1 French, Spanish, L2 Spanish,
French
No word-for-word translation
necessary.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupery – FH Le petit prince.pdf
Of course, you should have more
texts to do L-R.
All the books should first be read
(and enjoyed) in normal literary translation.
If you're interested in L-R, (even
if you don't know the languages) have a closer look at the texts to see how
they should be prepared.
aYa
Bye,
http://i42.tinypic.com/2j5dtt5.jpg
Bread upon the waters. Eat and let
the others die of hunger.
|
Give for free and take for free.
Mummy, was I downloaded?
No, you were born, sweetheart.
Daddy says I was downloaded.
Who downloaded you?
Daddy did. He asked OUR MOTHER, THE
INTERNET and she searched for me. She said my name wasn't Public Domain and she
had to hunt.
Did she shoot you?
She did. With http isohunt dot com.
Books belong to people who haven’t
read them (yet).
II bene di un
libro sta nell'essere letto. (Umberto Eco)
Should you pay? If you can afford
it, you ought to. If you cannot, how can you?
aYa
|
Science is not about citations, fame,
authority, being polite, etc. Science is all about experimenting, unorthodox
thinking and trying to find out how things really are. It is not 'magister
dicit', it is 'amica veritas' – not 'who' but 'what' and 'how'. It thrives on
freedom, it abhors censorship. It is always in statu nascendi. It is a patient
war against common nonsense, half-truths and lies sold as truths.
It is not about teaching, it is
about learning, it is a search for the inexplicable.
Learning languages and writing about
it is a craft, sometimes bordering on art, it is subjective and individual.
Anything goes as long as you think it is good enough for you.
It's a trivial task.
Creating new things is not, it's
always a search for the inexplicable, it takes a little bit of courage and...
thinking and... hell of a lot of work.
Many people (the majority?) pay more
attention to WHO says something than to WHAT is said.
That is in contradiction with Rule
Number One of thinking:
Amicus Plato sed magis amica
veritas.
My country is the world and my
religion is to fight stupidity (my own in particular), and stupidity, they say,
is more plentiful than hydrogen in the Universe.
aYa
Men are born ignorant, not
stupid.
Any action, from a simple one, like
putting a finger into your nose, to a most complicated one, like acquiring a
new language or writing a masterpiece, involves the following:
1. goals (your own or other people’s)
2. tools (your knowledge,
creativity, freedom, open-mindedness, TIME /believe me, fractions of a second
count/, materials, friends, etc)
3. control (external: somebody else
does it; internal: you yourself do it)
It DOES matter who sets your goals,
chooses your tools, and controls you. PONDER and you’ll see why hardly anyone
knows anything properly.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid.
They are made stupid by education.
Most people would rather die than
think; in fact, they do so.
There's an artist imprisoned in each
one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.
Do not fear to be eccentric in
opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
A good world needs knowledge,
kindliness, and courage;
How big media uses technology and
the law to lock down culture and control creativity
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
And the same text in Polish
aYa
siomotteikiru, atamagaii, etc (= aYa)
Listening-Reading system. The thread
which kicked it all off.
http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6366&PN=3&TPN=1
I’m not sure it’s worth reading – it
was butchered by the admin, and is littered with irrelevant posts by some
members who had nothing to say. Anyway, I’ve never read it myself.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=21098&PN=1
List of resource lists
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19563&PN=1&TPN=1
The Best Method Ever
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13501&PN=7
Parallel texts project
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19917&PN=1
http://www.bilingual-texts.com/library/
(it’s dead, the same below)
http://booh.com/blog/bilingual-text-2012
Japanese:
sheetz
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=804
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6241&PN=1
nandemoii:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5218
I had a dream
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19242&PN=1&TPN=1
http://video.qip.ru/video/view/?id=u150947577c3
http://video.qip.ru/video/view/?id=u2179131e13e
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=125567#p125567
M. Medialis
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18499&PN=2
Splog:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FluentCzech#p/u/4/C3y8v0Ftk0Q
http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method
Luke
Learning French Fast
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6764&PN=4
kealist
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9414&PN=2
Most helpful member
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=6
Speaks: French, English, German,
Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Latin,
Ancient Greek
Studies: Hungarian, Japanese, Polish
02
August 2009 at 7:05pm | IP Logged
Before leaving, deactivating myself
so as not to go on clashing with a certain oh so knowlegeable member {he means
Cainntear}, I want to name the one most helpful for me:
"Siomotteikiru" {aYa}. Her L-R thread! I
can't do L-R the way she does, but it helped me to see where I was going wrong.
Word-lists are all very nice, but I
can't learn words the way Iversen does, in a vacuum, I get totally frustrated
and bored after a day or two. And I'd only know those words on the page, not in
real life. I know, I've been there.
I have to make sure I really know
what a text is about, to make it memorable, if I want to learn from it,
properly. Parallel texts I'd read the wrong way round before, making it a slow
and painful experience.
I have to use a lot more audio than
before, to get to "natural" listening and "natural"
understanding/knowledge. Thanks for making me try and find a way to get over my
unwillingness to listen to audio-books. I just needed to realise how marvellous
that is, using an mp3 player! 2 ear-plugs!! Just sitting listening didn't work,
my mind would wander. And I hated using a walkman, that one ear-plug thingy
made me feel weird. Both ears plugged in make all the difference. Well, it
wasn't really Siomotteikiru who told me to use mp3 players, but she pointed the
way, without her I don't think I'd ever have tried.
It's the whole way my going about
language learning has changed because of her. I find I appreciate literature
much more if I listen to it, rather than read it. Even in foreign languages I
don't know so well, like Polish (I just loved listening to Mikołajek [Le Petit
Nicolas]). As a result I also appreciate reading more than I did, Russian for
instance, a lot of listening to texts has allowed me to become a better,
faster, more appreciative reader.
Yes, Siomotteikiru it is, I changed
my approach a fair bit because of him/her and am also much more consistent than
I've ever been. Unless I was obliged to (school, living in
Dixi.
Speaks: Danish*,
French,
English,
German,
Italian,
Spanish,
Portuguese,
Dutch,
Swedish,
Romanian,
Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans,
Greek,
Latin,
Icelandic,
Norwegian,
Esperanto,
Russian,
Gaelic
(Irish), Lowland
Scots
[QUOTE=Iversen]
Congratulations, siomotteikuru {aYa},
it is not often that I have to think a post over for several days before I have
considered all its implications.
My first thought was: this looks
like the way I have used the http://gloss.lingnet.org/searchResources.aspx
– GLOSS-lessons , – there you have the original text, a translation plus an
aural version all in one, though with shorter, non-literary texts.
My next thought was: at which point
in my own learning process would your method be most effective. I came to the
result that I would want to know the basics of the language – some morphology,
a minimal vocabulary plus knowledge about the phonematics of the language –
before I started listening/reading. One reason for this is that it is
timeconsuming and difficult to find your way round a written text unless you
already have some training in reading that language, – this is especially true
if you lose your place in the text and had to find it quickly again. With texts
in another alphabet than your native one this is even more important.
So I would think that your method
gives the best results from somewhere round the level of a good beginner or
intermediate fluency up to basic fluency.
Then there is the question of using
large (and generally difficult) texts. If you are to benefit from your reading
of the translation I suppose you have to subdivide it into short sections of
maybe a paragraph or two up to half a page at a time, – in your own words:
"You only remember well what you understand and what you feel is
"yours" psychologically ". I would lose that feeling for the
first page of Anna Karenina if I had to read the whole book first. When you are
advanced enough to skip the initial reading of the translation this of course
doesn't apply any longer, and you can survive longer sections in one go.
As you mention it is important to
use texts that are interesting because of their content. For me that would not
necessarily be literary texts,- there are a great number of books about science
in reasonably good translations. Unfortunately you won't get any actor to read
aloud a book about nuclear physics or zoology, – the availability of audiobooks
is the main advantage I see in using the usual heap of literary masterworks.
The quality of the translations is
also all-important. They have to be as literal as possible, otherwise they will
just be one more source of confusion. Ideally they should be so literal that
they don't even conform to the rules of the language they are written in
(however I see that siomotteikuru have another opinion on that). But such
translations are in practice impossible to find, and you may have to accept
translations that are more concerned with being good literature in their own
right than telling you exactly what is in the original.
I use one listening technique that
is diametrally opposite to listening-reading, namely listening 'like a
bloodhound follows a trail'. The main idea here is that you should listen
without trying to translate or even understand, just follow (and subdividing)
the stream of sounds and if you know enough words and grammar the meaning will
pop up in your head just like when you listen to a language that you know well
– you just need a better source and more concentration. However this can only
done with success at a rather advanced stage, so listening with an exact
transcript in your hand is by a wide margin the best alternative until then.
You need to find aural sources with exact transcripts, but the use of
audiobooks is of course the logical solution to that problem. No problem there,
– the problem is to find usable translations into a language you know well.
All in all I would say that your
method is attractive and probably effective, and I'm going to think seriously
about what I can use from it.
Iversen on 04 July 2007 [/QUOTE]
((Iversen - Guide to Learning
Languages, part 1:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16932&PN=1))
(....)
However in L-R the situation is
different: here you essentially have the same text in two parallel versions, –
one is typically audio, the other either a transcript or a literal translation,
and my experiments have convinced me that this is indeed possible. There isn't
any competition for decoding resources because you only have one decoding
running, but from two sources. In fact I was quite surprised when I experienced
first-hand that I could follow an audio example in GLOSS while reading the
translation.
So why don't I use L-R more? Mainly
because I find literature boring, and practically all audio books are
literature. The speakers are either amateurs, and then the recording is
generally bad and the voices are unpleasant, or it is a professional actor, and
these have a nauseating tendency to dramatize everything – my ideal is
something close to a good news speaker: clear and neutral. Of course listening
get is even more boring with slow speech.
(...)
But I would use L-R more, if I could
find suitable sources. If there were an ridiculously easy "dummy"
level of Gloss, then that would be the perfect thing for me.
btw. one by-product of my flirting
with L-R is that I have made bilingual written texts the basis of my work with
weak languages. Most translations are not so literal that you can immediately
identify the role and meaning of each element of the target language text, but
having a rough idea about the meaning saves a lot of time. Digital translations
can serve the same purpose, – you can't trust them, but they may point you in
the right direction (though only when used from the target language to your
base language, because you per definition can't see when there is something
vaguely rotten in a translation into a language which you don't master yet).
Iversen on 23 March 2009
I had done a little mock-LR before
with a friend, with l'Étranger in French and Chinese, one of us holding one
version. It wasn't bad, and I respect an awful lot
It turns out this is an excellent method for
learning chess as well. Although not really a language, application of this
method has increased my chess strength in the short time I have been doing it.
using this method with chess you do
not memorize anything. You simply go over the master games using a data base.
You do not need to take lots of time on each move just watch the game as it
progresses and soon you get more and more familiar with excellent chess and how
it is played. You pick up structures tactics and everything.
its exactly like a language. I am
not sure this is proper content for a language thread but learning chess this
way is like learning chess "language"
Studies: Russian, French, Japanese
Message 34 of 40
28 February 2010 at 2:19pm | IP
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Thanks again AniaR {aYa}!
Yes, I'm definitely serious about L-R. L-R is more than a language learning
method for me, it has become a lifestyle. I never read literature before, and
now I'm discovering so much – while learning new languages at the same time.
|
M. Medialis wrote:
|
Studies: French
Message 2 of 2
05 June 2010 at 7:18pm | IP
Logged
Thanks for reposting these passages
Volte.
It was really a strike of lighting
when I first read about the listening-reading method. I went through every post
of the 50+ page topic. It was so obvious and clear yet no one had pointed it
out. Often the most simple things are the most effective as the method proves.
I think it’s important to point out too that the L-R method is not only an
excellent tool to learn languages but also a chance to get a real education in
literature. I myself am learning French and names like Stendhal, Zola, Verne,
Maupassant, Proust, Flaubert, Hugo, Voltaire etc. meant nothing to me before.
There is nothing more I like to do then to share this method with other
language learners and witness their excitement to hear of something so simple
but so practical and interesting.
The entire concept of L-R method as
introduced here on this site comes straight from the school that teaches quacks
how to give information to patients in need of real care. Pure bull$hit. Makes
absolutely no sense and the people that get in line are the same sheep looking
for the magic pill, the amazing never seen before secret that will have them
master a language in no time, with no real work. Piss.
I have spoken to my mom on the
phone. generally and in an unbiased way I tried to describe Siomotteikiru {aYa}
and his behavior, just out of sheer curiosity to see what she had to say about
him. I also read about 15-20 of Siomotteikiru's posts to her. It was over the
phone and I was translating directly from English into Slovak, so please bare
in mind that it is difficult and somewhat inaccurate to psychiatrically examine
people over such a distance in such a way, but this is what she told me:
He is most probably a male, under 30
years old and mentally ill.. so not psychopathic as I said, but mentally ill.
She diagnosed an initial stage of Schizophrenia. She said that:
- in this case of the illness the thoughts
loose their healthy structure and are driven from reality and that a mentally
healthy person which is listening does not always understand what is said and
is confused :-) that he/she doesn't understand what the mentally ill person is
talking about. If the thoughts are sometimes substituted with coherent ones, it
is even more confusing.
- that to non-professionals the
thoughts seem very coherent and had she not seen 500+ such cases before, she
would also think that these were the thoughts of a very strange, but a not
mentally ill person.
typical signs:
- free associations – fast switching
of concepts, sentences that change topics within the same sentence. sentences
in one paragraph, that have no connection between eachother(a healthy person
does them too, but not as frequently)
- cannot revise himself (behave),
even after he's been repeatedly asked to do so
- the speech seems to have sense,
but when you examine it more closely you discover that it really doesn't..
which is caused by the mentioned frequent free associations, and other
elements.
she also said that he must've been a
very intelligent person before the illness and that the illness is quite
recent. she also suggest seeing a specialist very soon.
Again.. to diagnose someone over the
phone by reading his posts and by me trying to describe that person is very
inaccurate, but she said it is very probable. She said he reminds her of a
patient she has right now too.
When I asked how it was possible
that he speaks such perfect English and Russian, she said that he has learned
the languages before the illness occurred. She also said that in Schizophrenia,
the gender sometimes tends to fluctuate within the patient, but in later
stages.
Vlad on 30 November 2007
aYa’s comment:
'Is Mr. Vlad Slovak a crazy old
woman?'
'No! She's a crazy young man!'
((Mr. = Mister))
((Vlad’s real name is Vladimir
Skultety, here’s his site: http://www.foreverastudent.com/))
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=24387&PN=2&TPN=2
Rediscovering LR
And at last I can use my newly
attained freedom to dive into all my LR materials. -Discovering the stories of
Kenji Miyazawa and O. Henry (among many others). LR could as well be an
abbreviation of "Literature Reading" or "Love to Read":
Good native actors, a good translation and the thrill of a great story
=> language learning euphoria!
A new favourite is Miyazawa's story
"The Acorns and the Wildcat", together with the fantastic
dramatization at fantajikan: Pure happiness:
Fantajikan – The Acorns and the Wildcat
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=24602&PN=1&TPN=4
A good story with quality materials
and well-aligned parallel text makes studying a sheer joy! :)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26852&PN=1&TPN=4
As I like the LR-idea and use it
with good success, while many new contributors are not aware of it any longer,
I want to give a link to a collection of texts, compiled by Volte,
a kind of overview of the original discussion:
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages.htm
Just some short comments:
If you can't understand the method
as it is described in these not necessarily systematic passages, you won't be
very successful using LR either.
Some people always want "t h
e" method, LR is o n e method. Methods are not religions, but tools.
You must be a good and quick reader,
a text you use for LR should not be the first book you ever read in your life
...
What have you learned about language
learning?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=29512&PN=1&TPN=4
The only time I really got a
methodological surprise was when I tried listening to a podcast while reading a
translation (as suggested by Siomotteikiru {aYa}
as part of the Listening/Reading method). Unfortunately the method demands a
spoken text, a transcript and a literal translation and getting those
together is a problem – especially for non-fictional texts. So in practice I
work on bilingual texts until I can understand speech without the help of
transcripts and translations. But still, it was a surprise that it was possible
to follow speech in Iranian without ever having tried to learn the language.
Brun_Ugle flies again (TAC 2012 team
い)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30326&PN=1&TPN=2
Message 14 of 51
20 December 2011 at 10:04pm | IP
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These past few days, I’ve been doing
a lot of Listening-Reading with the Japanese translation of Harry Potter. It’s an
amazing technique. I can’t believe the improvements I’ve been making in this
short time! It took me a while to get the hang of it, but now it’s great.
This is my way of doing it (a slight
variation on the original): I’ve already read Harry Potter many, many times,
especially the first books because I reread them before each new release. So I
know the book very well. This is important. It’s also important that it is a
book you like well enough to read it again and again. So, that’s the first step
(knowing the book in your own language) down.
The next step is reading in the
foreign language (Japanese) while listening to the audiobook in the same
language. And the third step is to read the book in a language you know well
(English) while listening in the foreign language (Japanese). It takes a little
practice read in one language and listen in another, but it gets easier. I find
it nice to alternate back and forth between these two steps, although that
isn’t how the original poster of the technique recommended. I haven’t gotten to
the shadowing part. The audio is very fast and I am not a fast talker usually
in any language and certainly not in Japanese. I’ve also found it best to go
through the whole book each time. I was doing one chapter at a time, but not
anymore. I think meeting the same word in different contexts helps me learn it.
And in a whole book, most words are bound to be repeated several times.
Anyway, this seems to have given my
Japanese a turbo-boost. The improvement in listening comprehension is amazing.
I still have a long way to go, but it has allowed me to take a great leap
forward in a very short time.
I have some hypotheses about why
this is so. One thing I’ve noticed, and which seems counterintuitive, is that
(up to a point) the faster he speaks, the easier it is to understand. I started
thinking about why this might be so, and came up with the following. One thing
is that he speaks faster and faster as the story gets more exciting. It is
natural to assume that the most exciting parts are often also very concrete and
easy to visualize. That means that I probably have a stronger image of these
scenes in my mind and it is thus easier to attach the Japanese to the image.
However, I think there is more to it than that. I think the speed itself is
also somewhat important.
I am a visual thinker. When I hear
words, they create images for me – not just pictures, but also sensation and
such. So when I read or listen to a story, I am there inside the story.
However, this doesn’t work as well in a foreign language when there are a lot
of words I don’t understand. The words I know well work as they would
in English – they come into my head, become images and the words
themselves disappear, leaving room for new words to come in. The problem is with
words I “almost” know. These are words that I’ve seen before, perhaps studied,
but don’t know well enough for that instantaneous translation into images.
Before, when I would listen to something, my mind would latch on to these words
trying to remember what they mean. Of course, then I would miss the next three
of four words, maybe more. These could be words I might have understood had I
heard them. This latching on to words lowers my listening comprehension. When
he speaks fast, it seems my mind doesn’t get the time to latch on and try to
figure out the words. By letting the words go, I actually understand more!
I think another clue to why
listening-reading works is that even if you only understand one word in four,
the images are already in your head (from having read the story before), so
those words easily call up that image. Since the image is already there, the
“almost known” words often become clear because the context of the image is
enough to remind you of their meaning. Gradually other, formerly completely
unknown words also become clear because you hear them several times and over
time naturally fit them into the image. Like a half-done puzzle – the missing
pieces are easy to fit in.
This guy
discovered L-R on his own and... did nothing to improve his discovery:
Are transcripts while listening
useful?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30479&PN=1&TPN=2
I got a Spanish audio book of Peter
Pan from Amazon, but I was having trouble following some of the passages. I
just couldn't make out some of the words because they were spoken too fast and
run too close together. I couldn't find a transcript in Spanish, but I did find
the whole book, in English, on Gutenberg.
Surprisingly, listening to the
Spanish while skimming the English text helped me a lot to understand
those difficult passages. That way I wasn't getting word for word what the
Spoken Spanish was saying, but I was getting enough of a hint from
the English to figure out for myself what the Spanish audio was saying.
Most helpful member
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=2
Then Siomotteikiru {aYa}
passed by and shattered my universe by showing that there was an alternative
both to silly dialogs in the classroom and fruitless searches for sufficiently
easy texts, namely listening to recordings in a foreign language while following
a bilingual translation. I think this must be the best way for a beginner to
hear a lot of foreign talk and getting the 'buzz' in your head that is the
forerunner for structured, effortless thinking in the foreign language. I have
never spent those long hours listening to novels that Siomotteikiru
recommended, partly because I get bored listening to anything and literature in
particular, but even in smaller doses the method is valuable... as a supplement
to wordlists, intensive reading and as much ordinary extensive reading as you
can manage to do.
Most helpful member
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=2
This is the single
most exciting thing about language
learning I've ever read...
My second vote is for Volte because
of her thread
and because of her many thorough
postings about her experiences using the L-R method.
When did your L2 start sounding
normal
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=31128&PN=1
It depends on what you do with/in
the language. Listening-Reading makes languages familiar very quickly.
L-R: Is Parallel Text Necessary?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32408&PN=1
|
Sunja wrote:
|
That's interesting to hear this
perspective. Contrary to Sunja, I don't have any problem with this step at all.
In fact, for me, it is the crux of the L-R method. I feel like my listening
comprehension improves the most rapidly at this stage, since I can't rely on
reading the L2 text, and that my vocabulary increases the fastest, since I'm
seeing the translations in English but not having to look anything up.
Also I do this step before I do the L2-L2 step. I find it works a lot better
for me that way.
I think like Iguanamon said, the way
to figure out what works the best for you is indeed through trial and error. As
Sunja shows (and tons of other older posts on this forum also show), everybody
needs to find their own way of doing L-R that works the best for them. There is
no consensus on what the best way is.
As far as the issue of parallel
texts goes, I do not believe that they are in anyway necessary. However, you
may find them helpful (though still never necessary). If you have parallel
texts already, then I would say to use them. If you don't, then I'd say don't
bother.
I don't have any problems with
listening to L2 while reading L1, but of course I have to pay attention
to L2. For those who just have L2 audio in the background (like any
random radio program), L-R is probably not the best method.
18 May 2012
|
chobbs wrote:
|
It's not so complicated: You listen
to French and use your English text to get the meaning. That's basically
it, and as you have correctly noticed you don't really need the French text for
doing it.
While not complicated, the procedure
is not really easy, and most people won't be able to follow both the audio and
the text in a useful way. You'll see, after some hours, if there is a chance
that it can work for you, if not there is no reason to feel bad about it,
you'll have to take a slower path, but original text, translation and audio are
an ideal combination even when used in a different way than the original method
proposes.
Can a parallel text make sense at
this "stage 3"? Of course, at the beginning you will certainly lose
track of the narration and will be glad that you can look at the French text so
that you can find a paragraph where you can reenter. Often you'll want to know
how a word is spelled, and a quick glance at the French text can help. But this
looking back and forth between original and translation will take away from
your concentration on the actual narration and the flow of the language, so it may
not be advisable. It may be better to look such things up in a second or third
step.
Would I spend, let's say 40 hours
building a parallel text, if I don't have one? No. Two hours? Yes, why not, a
bilingual text is and has always been an excellent tool, L-R or not.
Do you want both texts at all? Of
course, I use to have the book in both languages. Only audio and translation
can work, but probably more at a later stage, when you are pretty advanced (or
for languages like mandarin with a very complicated writing system). At the
beginning you should use both versions, of course (this just because I did not
understand from your posts, if you have the French text, but probably yes, so
in this case just ignore this).
Just give it a try, getting the
meaning by using the translation, that's the essence, there is no need for
focusing on technicalities.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32408&PN=1&TPN=2
AFAIK, step 3 as described originally relies on two assumptions.
1. The book is one you have read in L1 and know well. You therefore know roughly what is
coming up next and do not have to concentrate on deciphering plot and meaning
in your own language as well.
2. Most people can skim read in
their own language faster than a narrator will speak the text. The idea then is
to skim the paragraph just BEFORE the narrator gets to it, in the gap between
paragraphs if that is long enough. You then can concentrate on the L2 speech
and try to correlate it with what you have just read.
I have tried it with varying degrees
of success. Maybe I am not one of the "intelligent" people the
I can understand why the
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32657&PN=1
I heartily agree with Serpent's
recommendations to use audiobooks. They are incredibly useful, even if your
goal is purely reading. In languages where not all vowels are routinely
indicated in writing, such as Persian or Arabic, they're indispensable.
Personally, I like starting with a parallel text and target language audiobook
of literary material on day one, but that's a minority preference on this
forum; using audiobooks at some point during study, on the other hand, is
uncontroversial.
Please recommend l/r material for
Russian
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32688&PN=1
Another issue I have discovered is
that, for me personally, I need a fairly literal English translation to go
along with the Russian audio. One book that has worked very well for me,
surprisingly, is Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita." Not exactly a
beach read, but a great book, and for some reason fairly easy to follow from
the audio. Get the Pevear and Volokhonsky English translation--it works
perfectly with the audio. You might try other translations of theirs; they have
translated a number of classic novels and have a nice English style and
render the Russian as literally as possible. I haven't tried to L-R their other
translations yet, but I did read their new "Doctor Zhivago"
translation, which was outstanding. I can't make it through Zhivago in Russian
yet.
LR method – more questions
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32699&PN=1&TPN=2
My attitude to L-R is fairly
pragmatic, rather than purist. Use whatever material you
have available or can get easily,
for as long a time as you can spare.
I don't suppose many people can
devote as long as what is supposed to be ideal.
But if you are going to be reading
for a longish time, e.g. more than an hour, it wants
to be something that will keep you
interested and wanting to turn the pages.
I think that is a more important
factor than the length of the material as such.
Short stories might work for some
people.
But what I can say is: LR is a good
tool even once you are at B2 and above. It will be less demanding than at the
beginning, you can concentrate on vocabulary, idioms, intonation, style, well,
just every single aspect of the language, so it will always be useful even for
advanced learners.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32408&PN=1&TPN=3
|
James29 wrote:
|
I am glad to hear that we have members
for whom L-R is actually the easiest thing they can do. I'd like to know if
they think it is effective, too, or if it is just easy, but not effective.
But there are of course some
conditions which may influence your experience.
What is your level? If you could
just as well listen to the audio and understand nearly everything perfectly
well, because the book is easy and you are very advanced: It will probably be
easy. If you don't really care what you get from it, then having an audio
running in the background and occasionally glancing at the corresponding book
won't be difficult. The results won't be overwhelming either. Many people will
find reading L2 and listening to L2 easy, either because they are already at an
advanced level or because they pay no attention to any semantics, and the whole
procedure will become a complicated kind of parroting, which you can just as
well call shadowing if all you care for is the phonetic aspect.
People who use to read a lot will
have less problems than occasional readers, certainly a major factor not to be
neglected; (many of the people I work with are not readers, they read sms and
some chat on facebook or similar sites, and they won't think it is easy, even
if they are, of course, just as intelligent as everybody else.)
So people are very different, and
many people don't mean the same even when using the same words. My standard
guess would be that if you think it is very easy, then you could probably gain
much more if you would do it in a way that is more demanding for your personal
intellectual profile.
Learning rare languages
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=20952&PN=1
TixhiiDon
(Englishman living in
I am fascinated by the L-R method as
I kind of invented something along the same lines for myself when I was
studying Russian at university and I know how effective it is.
With Georgian, however, it seems to
be completely impossible – almost no Georgian literature has been translated
into English and I have yet to find a single Georgian audiobook on the
entire Worldwide Web.
Repeated passive exposure becomes
active?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=32985&PN=1
Well, I've been doing a lot of L-R
lately. I am not sure if you count this as passive exposure. But anyway, I was
asking myself the question: is this helping me to think in my TL? And the
answer was: I'm not sure. But what it does seem to be doing is cause TL words
or phrases to suddenly pop into my head while I'm going about my everyday
business (i.e. not in language-learning mode, especially), and in my head, I
can hear the native language speaker on the recording saying the word or
phrase, and sometimes I repeat it. I don't know if I'm getting it right, but I
suspect (and hope) that the more I do this, the more correct it will become.
I voted for yes, because in my
experience it does. Especially with reading, imo.
A great example that this works is
LR, by the way.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=33405&PN=1&TPN=22
So, are there any among us who
delayed speaking, yet had always intended to speak well eventually, who can
report achieving good speaking skills?
Well, I did tons of LR in Polish, a
lot of reading and quite a bit of shadowing. I seriously doubt my conversations
in
Also, in
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=33205&PN=1&TPN=2
ah i see, LR is different than
simply listening and reading haha. I've been assuming that LR just meant
listening and reading to text/audio, not a technique.
Wulfgar
(aka leosmith
– double account, a clone)
I believe LR is anything you want it
to be, right? Or do you follow the rules of the first post made on the subject?
Anyway, it's a really bad method for
Mandarin, unless your L1 is another Chinese language, or possibly Japanese.
Why would that be? It seems to be a
fine method for Japanese for native speakers of European languages. The writing
system isn't that big of a barrier.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=33715&PN=1
I'm also happy with how my Polish studies
went. Working towards a native-like pronunciation when I could barely come up
with a sentence of my own was an interesting experience. I did a lot of
listening (classic LR), I tried out foreign tongue-twisters for the first time
(not sure they're useful for all languages, but they're definitely useful for
Polish)... and I did shadowing. Not a lot of it, it's documented in the
consistency thread. A total of 18 days. And most of it was what I call
LR-shadowing – doing LR and understanding it well enough that you want to
shadow/repeat some individual words/phrases. I didn't even realize this was a
part of LR method, heh. I now do this in Danish and I think one day I'll even
be able to speak it :o)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=33962&PN=1
Some of the threads on the LR method
talk about needing 50 hours worth of exposure – do people think this means 50
hours worth of material (i.e. a number of audiobooks that are, in total, 50
hours long) or does it mean that you can use, say, a 10 hour audiobook which
you go through 5 times?
40-50 hours of material. A 10 hour
audiobook isn't enough.
I haven't done the active phase.
I've found what I have done effective as described; some other people have
written about variations they've liked better.
The main caveat is that I find
material learned very rapidly tends to also fade rapidly if not maintained and
perhaps expanded on over the next while. I gain comprehension quite quickly
with it, but if I just L-R for a week or two and then neglect a language, then
try to use it months or years later, the results are not good. While this kind
of (sometimes temporary) attrition applies to almost every method, it applies
particularly strongly to intensive ones. Stopping L-R before reaching natural
listening is also best avoided.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34103&PN=1
If the
Listening – Reading works, then...
... why aren't all the people who
watch thousands of hours of Japanese anime with English subtitles fluent
in Japanese?
Because that's not LR. When there
are three channels: video, L2 audio, L1 text, it's much easier to just ignore
the L2.
There are several factors.
-> knowledge of the material
for L-R to be really effective, you
should actually know the text well beforehand
-> length and consistency
depending on your sources, quality
and style of subtitles change from episode to episode, meaning that you can't
permanently link one expression to one translation. also, information density
is lower compared to audio plays or audio books.
-> mindset
L-R isn't entertainment, it means
staying at peak concentration for hours at a time. it's hard.
-> anime
most anime I watched some episodes of
so far used Japanese register and speech styles as a device for
characterization. that means that you can have a group of characters talking
about exactly the same event, and using vastly different words to refer to the
same idea. it's difficult to match up those expressions to fit the one
translation you read, unless you already have a good enough foundation to
understand most of the dialogue without translation.
|
Bao wrote:
|
Although there is the initial stage
of difficulty, I think Listen/Reading also incorporates the concept of flow, which is an
integral part of the system.
Wow. That's what I've been trying to
explain for like forever and been arguing with Wulfgar about. My basic
observation is that it's better NOT to "do something every day" if
you don't have enough time to really experience flow. For LR or
listening/reading separately you need flow, even if it means studying less
often.
And yeah, I never think of it as
hard. It's very enjoyable if you're doing it at the right time. (in my case I
mean my cycle, but it's important for anyone to analyse whether they're in the
right state of mind for LR. The best time is when you're not tired but not
hyper either.) I can't call it easy but it's not hard.
(my – aYa’s
– answers)
@ProfessssorRich
Ask them how many thousands of hours
they have spent on reading books worth reading and listening to audiobooks worth
listening to.
More
here: My comment about the above passage:
@luke
as to the concept of flow, I call it
‘soul shattering awe/experience’ see AWE
In Polish:
|
FALA NOŚNA: coś, co cię nie męczy i niesie
ku niebu, radość ci sprawia ogromną. |
aYa
emk United States 24 December 2014
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=39493&PN=1&TPN=17#522718
Experiment 2: Listening/Reading. I just
went through chapter 1 of Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal using Aglona Reader and Smart AudioBook Player. It takes a bit of practice to
scroll, pause and resume, but after fooling around for a few minutes, I had no
problems.
Listening/Reading is a pretty hardcore listening exercise! I get hit hard and
fast with native content, and I need to work very hard to keep up. Of course, I
wind up losing a huge amount. Interestingly, I've found that I use
the English text more than the Spanish text. But my eyes dart around
quickly nonetheless. It's a very active experience.
I have a tutorial which shows how to use LF Aligner with Aglona Reader. You need Windows (a VM is fine), a spreadsheet program, and a Ruby interpreter, so it's not for everybody. Using these instructions will allow you to align two entire ebooks, complete with a table of contents.
syrichw Taiwan Speaks: Mandarin*, English 02 August 2015 at 6:37pm
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=40706&PN=1&TPN=2
I'd like to share my experience with L-R.
Some of my thoughts:
1. L-R works for 0 beginners.
2. L-R works if you only invest a small amount of time. I do L-R 1-1.5 hours a
day.
3. Remember Krashen i-1 hypothesis: If you cannot follow the plot or understand
every single word, you can pause and read the translation first. Also avoid
materials that make you feel bored. Comprehension makes progress.
4. Do not be worried about translation errors. You will be able to notice it by
yourself soon. (It happens in Harry Potter and Brave New World)
5. The longer you listen, the more you get.
I've tried it on two languages: Korean and Danish. Here is what I've done:
Korean: After watching nearly 200 hours of Korean drama, I tried L-R with the
Korean New Testament. I listen to the Korean audio and read the Chinese
version. I did not use parallel text. I found that the Korean sentence
structure has seemed more natural to me and I picked up some words as well.
However, I did not reach the natural listening stage after L-Red the Book of
Relevation and I felt dissappointed. Then I got an opportunity to study in
Denmark this September and I decided to switch my target language. I stopped
L-R Korean.
Danish: From April, I made nearly 100 hours of L-R. Not sure if I reached
natural listening, but now with translation I can understand Harry Potter and
Brave New World in Danish easily.
What I've L-Red:
April:
1. Jehovah's Witness My Bible Stories: At first, I listened to each chapter
three times. The first time L2-R1, then L2-R2 and the third L2-R1. The book is
easy. The audio is slow and clear. Great source for the most basic vocabulary
learning, but no more.
2. Harry Potter 1: (L2-R1, L2-R2, L2-R1) I can hardly understand anything at
first and it made me frustrated. So after a few chapters I gave up.
May:
3. Genesis & Exodus: (L2-R1) I started to feel that if I read Danish while
listening to the Danish audio, I tend to recognize words by the shape of the
words instead of the sound. So I stopped L2-R2. The bible was much more easier
than HP since certain words repeat a lot. I stopped to listen to the bible
after the Exodus because I felt bored and ready to face HP again.
4. Harry Potter 1-2: I can easily follow the plot after L-Red the first book.
Then I stopped L-R for nealy a month due to the final exam.
July:
5. Harry Potter 1 (the second time)
6. The old man and the sea: Much harder than HP. Noticed that not all the
narrator speak as clear as Jesper Christense, the man who read HP in Danish.
7. Harry Potter 2 (the second time)
8. Lolita: The story was great, but it was definitely super hard for L-R. My
understanding fell below 50%. I guessed perhaps the narration style is too
abstract for me and I am not familiar with the story lines. I decided to change
my strategy for the next book: Pause. Read a sentence or two in L1. Then play
the audio and be concentrated to the sounds and meaning.
9. Brave new world: Easy as Harry Potter.
And now I am current working on Harry Potter 3.
It feels really good to understand a foreign language without studying at all.
I borrowed a Teach Yourself Danish from the University's library and the
content is easy to understand. Written Danish is not hard at all. I cannot
fully understand news and radio now, but I think it would be easier after
listening to more books and moving to Denmark a few weeks later.
Edited by syrichw on 02 August 2015 at 6:50pm
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=40784&PN=1
Interactive L-R with Parallel Texts
An Senior Member United States
It has been nearly 10 years since siomotteikiru/aYa had
shared his/her beautiful
thoughts regarding L-R approach here in this forum.
Original L-R Thread
Although L-R was not new to many senior forum members here before that, aYa was
very kind to show her personal approach and to spend a great deal of time
answering many of our questions. As many of you I was instantly drawn to it and
had wished that the tool and materials were more available for learners.
Whether or not I agree with the specifics of the method, I found that there is something naturally addictive and easy about understanding a narrated story in parallel texts. When I Listen-Read and understand, I can feel the story...and I WANT TO FEEL the story/message whenever I am exposed to a new language. I LOVE that connection.
There had been many wishes and laborious attempts to create this tool. And here
after a long time, I would like to introduce to all the language learners here
the "interactive L-R parallel texts" website where learners can
- read along with highlight of parallel text (auto scrolling)
- hover L1-L2 and L2-L1 dictionary for quick definition
- click and restart from any phrase
- works on Ipad/Iphone with Photon/Puffin apps (flash support app)
Please free-signup and check it out
http://www.languagelovers.net/signup/
http://www.languagelovers.net/fr-en-
alice/
As of now I only have 1 French-English book available with more to come. It is
a slow work-in-progress and it is not perfect. Please let me know what you
think.
Thanks, happy parallel-texting and just read
AllenN
P.S Any tool can be used in different creative ways. Use what works for you at different
learning stages.
JW (not only) religious stuff
http://www.jw.org/en/publications/
Audio and pdf/epub, downloadable,
over 150 languages
Awake! magazine (a monthly) is readable even if you’re
not a JW or a religiously minded person (I am not, by the way – I believe in Richard Dawkins and his
younger sister, Jesus Christ). The articles are well written, the sentences are
short, translated into many languages, good quality audio. An excellent tool
for language learners.
These audiobooks are worth trying,
good enough for mL-R:
My Book of Bible Stories
Learn from the Great Teacher
The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived
(parallel texts here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/)
Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY (htm,
searchable), 2000-2015
English:
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/li/r1/lp-e
Japanese:
http://wol.jw.org/ja/wol/lv/r7/lp-j/0
Korean:
http://wol.jw.org/ko/wol/lv/r8/lp-ko/0
Chinese:
http://wol.jw.org/zh-Hans/wol/h/r23/lp-chs simplified
http://wol.jw.org/zh-Hant/wol/h/r24/lp-ch traditional
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/index.htm
(book2
parallel texts:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/)
http://www.scola.org/Scola/Default.aspx
http://gloss.dliflc.edu/search.aspx
Language learning podcasts
(line-by-line audio)
http://chinesepod.com/ (not only Chinese)
http://www.japanesepod101.com/ (not
only Japanese)
Audiobooks:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=525
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/audiobook
Enovels:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=2057
Language handbooks, etc:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=2362
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=125567#p125567
Some links about nothing in
particular
http://i50.tinypic.com/vzwy05.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
RSA Animate – Drive_ The surprising
truth about what motivates us.flv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
RSA Animate – Changing Education
Paradigms.flv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=relmfu
Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach
themselves
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Sugata Mitra: The child-driven
education
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQxFf7P68W4
Bye, keep smiling.
http://i48.tinypic.com/qy7m38.jpg
Fare thee well!
A good thing about life is that you
can smile first thing in the morning and keep smiling all day long, even if
your shit's fucked up.
A good thing about time is that you
can live ninety seconds a minute.
A good thing about thinking is that
there's only one rule to rule them all: There are no Rule(r)s.
A good thing about doing things is
that you can start here and now and keep on going, improving on the way.
A good thing about making things is
that you can create a little something with every breath you take.
A good thing about friendship is
that you can be a friend.
A good thing about love is that you
can love yourself and your pretty sisters.
A good thing about religion is that
you can believe in Amaterasu and Her younger sister, Jesus.
A good thing about death is that you
can get a one-way ticket to Tengoku and meet Amaterasu Oomikami there – She's
all smiles and omosiroi.
You're bound to learn for eternity.
I believe
that language is a system of interdependent
elements.
I believe
in personally relevant massive comprehensible exposure.
I believe
that soul shattering awe is the driving force.
I don’t
believe in learning anything without listening.
I don’t
believe in listening/speaking/reading/writing without consciously
learning pronunciation (phonemes – minimal pairs,
pitch accent, rhythm, intonation).
I don’t
believe in memorizing – brute force learning.
Wierzę, że
Muzy mieszkają na Parnasie i że „faunowie tańczą leśni”.
cudowne nic
bez granic
poezJa
Dixi et animam meam salvavi.
