I thought I was the only one doing this. I wrote a murder mystery novel in the style of Lingua Latina. It's 41 chapters long, and it teaches English. I finished it last year, so I am currently writing a Spanish one. I'm half way finished with it. I'm glad to see someone else taking this serious, and yes! Story Story Story! I don't see way they have to be boring. I'm going to have to subscribe to your channel. Can't wait to read your novel .
@nicholaslemosdecarvalho5328 Yes. I published the English version on my website, but it looks like the algorithm thinks I am spamming so I can't provide the link here. However, I talk about it a lot hint hint. The reason I published it as a web app instead of a book is because I am a software developer and was able to include professional audio narration with automatic word highlighting, I also added shadowing, and AI to it. I am currently working on adding a quiz section at the end of every chapter. I plan on doing the same for the Spanish version. Spanish is just too popular not to do it. This really is the best way to learn a language and seeing Cloin is also doing it is so great. We need more of this style of language teaching.
Longtime lurker here. I have been eagerly awaiting Oswald for what feels like centuries. I really love LOGOS for Ancient Greek, I can't wait to compare the effectiveness of the different pedagogical styles
I'm currently trying to learn Latin through Lingva Latina per se Illustrata. One of the things I really like about the book is that the stories are genuinely interesting.
Hi, Colin. Greetings from Colombia! I just found your channel last week and have enjoyed your perspective a lot. I study koine Greek, modern/biblical Hebrew, and live in Spanish (so learn something new almost every day). I loved your point about making the reader a story. I've been trying to get through the Assimil B2 Hebrew book for a while. I like their method, except it's hard to just study random topics with no plot. אני שונא את זה! עם סיפור זה יהיה הרבה יותר קל!
6:00 yussss thank you. Pimsluer Japanese was terrible for this. Introducing the words for daughter, son, and basically all relationship terms jammed me up so bad because of the overlap in meaning and sounds.
I will look forward to seeing how reading Osweald Bera compares with my Lingua Latina and Athenaze experiences. I think LLPSI is an inspired work of genius, despite some elements we might quibble with. I thought Athenaze [the English, not Italian version] was just a grammar-translation book dressed up with a story. I showed your video introducing Osweald to my Latin students, and they had fun figuring out what the Old English meant.
I agree with everything you said. I noticed when studying with something like Teach Yourself books that when opposites were introduced in the same lesson I'd invariably mix them up, then have to resort to mnemonics to get them straight. In university, I worked in a psycho-linguistics lab, and several of the experiments we ran were about this as well, measuring how much harder it was for people to recall things that were too similar semantically.
This is probably the most useful YT video I've seen in a while! Well done, Colin! I really loved your points about avoiding grammatical, and thematic sequencing. I find that these make readers for modern languages like Poco a poco and Le français seconde la méthode nature unsatisfactory resources. If you're familiar with these readers, I would love to hear what your thoughts are :) I have always wanted to create a graded reader for Brazilian Portuguese since I have not been able to find one, and this video has really inspired me to seriously consider taking on this project. Also, are there any good graded readers for Mandarin Chinese that you would suggest? Thanks!
Thank you very much! I agree with you about the early "Nature Method" readers like Poco a poco etc. I think they were a big step forward for their time but I find the thematic sequencing suboptimal. The stories also tend to be boring and often disconnected, which doesn't help either. I'd read the heck out of a Brazilian Portuguese version! For Mandarin I like the Imagin8 Press "Journey to the West" series. They're very good!
@@ColinGorrie Well, if and when I make a Brazilian Portuguese graded reader, you'll be the first person I send it to! And thank you so much for the Mandarin suggestion 🙏
My experience of Italian Athenaze is that it is a bit too ambitious with how many words it introduces in each chapter. I've never done the stats though. There's an interesting blog post from Magister P. about this, although it used the English Athenaze: the author found that the first chapter introduced 73 items, 20 of which were verbs. Source: magisterp.com/2017/02/08/cant-read-greek-unsurprised-but-angry/
Yes, I'm a long time Greek student and I found the vocab jumps between chapters (the IT version) to be a bit ridiculous. It didn't help that I had to look the glosses up by hand because I don't know Italian.
@@ZackSkrip I learned UItalian as a research language but used the English Athenaze back in the early 1990's. Previously the uni had used a series called "Reading Greek" which really did not introduce the language at all. TBH I was greatly pleased with Athenaze.
8:54 what you're describing here is the difference between an analytical approach (red, yellow, blue introduced together because they form their own class when you analyze them) and holistic approach (red, fire truck and blood introduced together because they're all similar in some way)
Perhaps you’re sick of my comments but I really can’t wait for Osweald Bera! I wish there was a way I could preorder it because I definitely would 😂. I check like every day while I have a second at work to see if it’s out!
Can't agree more on your last point. Very few graded readers are actually enjoyable to read Also, having an actual story and thus genre makes it easier to use words and grammar in a more natural context. You don't need to contrive bizarre situations to explore the subjunctive, because, say, a detective story is almost tailor made for words related to appearance and time, while the majority of the text will be in past tense and subjunctive mood as the story follows people's past actions, desires and motivations I would add another point: story complexity matters. It so happened that I never used a graded reader as an adult and learned the languages through grammar books and exposure, so I may be completely missing something, but text complexity and story complexity are kind of inversely dependent. A simple formulaic story may allow for a more complex text. Think "Conan the Barbarian". Words and structures Howard uses are far from simple and basic. Some of them are quite poetic. But the stories themselves are usually rather formulaic and simple. So even if you can't parse something you aren't lost. There is nowhere to be lost. On the contrary, a complex story requires a simple text. Think "The Big Sleep". Chandler wrote a dynamic story with twists and turns, but he rarely has sentences longer than five words and every grammatical structure is as textbook as it gets, so, again, you aren't lost and can always recover because gramatical relationships are never obscured by poetic choices
That's an excellent point about plot complexity being entirely unrelated to complexity of language! Come to think of it, Conan the Barbarian would be lots of fun in Old English...
It’s great for building up reading and listening stamina as a beginner and cementing vocab in long term memory, and there’s lots of other options for other vocab ranges.
Very interesting video and I can definitely agree that the plot, the story is very important. I teach Polish and English as foreign languages and graded readers work differently in this context. First, a graded reader is all at the same level. So an e.g. A2 student takes this book and everything is at A2 level - the grammar and vocabulary. Of course, it's impossible to predict which words the person knows, so there is no need to put emphasis on repetition (we might end up repeating those words the person already knows). It's important to keep them at the proper level, which is easier for the A1-B1 levels. As a guide we have topics that the student should be familiar with at each level, so it makes the vocabulary choice easier. Readers are not textbooks, Familia Romana is not a reader - it's a textbook. A reader should have also the grammar limited to the certain level, so the A2 student can read it without encountering new grammar. A reader is for reviewing, getting input, not learning. I agree that thematical chapters can be boring but that's why in teaching modern languages we do it gradually. So first you learn only a few colours and the rest comes later. That's true about every vocabulary group. So there will be a lesson on weather at every level from A1 to C2. Familia Romana bring grammar to around C1 level but vocabulary wise it's A2/B1 (it's less then 2000 words and C1 is around 10 000). Nevertheless LLPSI provides a framework, so there can be a reader for those who have read it till chapter XX. Such a reader should contain 98% of vocabulary that's already known and no new grammar. Otherwise it would become a textbook. As a learner I don't want to read a story (for extensive reading) which I have to read only after I have covered the whole grammar of the language or that introduces vocabulary in a way that I have to learn it in a way that's moving from one level to a higher, and another higher one etc. I want (and this is how it works in English) a story that I can read in the evening or two evenings, at the weekend. I', not sure if it was Krashen or P. Nation who researched that extensive reading should be even at a slightly lower lever (especially grammar wise) so that students' motivation is boosted up by the sense of achievement, those 2% of new vocabulary items easily acquired and (that's my observation) that students start learning syntax and a long term focus on a text. This is probably just another perspective, but as a Latin learner I see there are some IMHO false ideas about the levels of language acquisition (like the idea that LLPSI Familia Romana brings the student to C1 level as far as vocabulary is concerned) and that readers should be like Julia by Reeds or "Ora Maritima". They are materials that a teacher can use to enrich what a textbook offers but a graded reader is IMHO something different - it's a full story that's aimed at learners at a certain level and is an interesting story that they can read easily. Therefore both vocabulary and grammar have to be adapted to the level (be it A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 or C2).
Thanks, Colin, for your thoughts. From my own knowledge of language acquisition, I agree with all that you have shared......the limitation that I have found in my own learning (Swedish) at this point is that the graded readers are few and far between. If you have hints as to how to find them, I (and I bet others) would greatly appreciate your suggestions
Chambers, The Greek War of Independence is very good as a graded reader for Ancient Greek. The story is strong (if you like history) and he did a good job of repeating vocabulary.
I know you're talking about beginners, but once you get to intermediate level, you just really have to throw yourself into the deep end to some extent and get stuck in with original texts and be prepared to refer to a good dictionary a lot. In my case, that was coming to terms with Caesar's DBG.
On point 1: You said that new words should take up only 2%-10% of the word count. I assume that means the total number of new words and the total number of words in the chapter, period, rather than the total number of unique new words and unique words in the chapter? Assuming it's the total word count, I assume your 5% new word budget doesn't involve having each new word just appear once, or having just one new word take up 5% of the chapter, so how do you find the balance between repeating a word and the number of unique new words introduced?
You're correct - the calculation is new lemmata / total running word count. As you point out, ideally you would repeat these new words to aid in their learning. I don't think there's a good set of guidelines for how many repetitions you need to learn a word. I suspect it varies a lot depending on how abstract the word is, whether it's a "cognate" (in the SLA sense, e.g. biologist / biólogo), whether it's introduced with distractors, etc. I suspect it's somewhere between 15-25 repetitions for most words but that's a gut instinct. Getting these repetitions without sacrificing the story is very difficult, which is why I think authors need to encourage rereading - and this means writing a story that holds up to rereading.
I assume you are moments away from uploading an OB launch video but I COULD NOT WAIT I had to come tell you that I am BARFING WITH EXCITEMENT I took the email to my boyfriend and said "THIS SHALL BE MY CHRISTMAS PRESENT"
I thought I was the only one doing this. I wrote a murder mystery novel in the style of Lingua Latina. It's 41 chapters long, and it teaches English. I finished it last year, so I am currently writing a Spanish one. I'm half way finished with it. I'm glad to see someone else taking this serious, and yes! Story Story Story! I don't see way they have to be boring. I'm going to have to subscribe to your channel. Can't wait to read your novel .
This is really interesting! Are you going to publish it somewhere?
@nicholaslemosdecarvalho5328 Yes. I published the English version on my website, but it looks like the algorithm thinks I am spamming so I can't provide the link here. However, I talk about it a lot hint hint. The reason I published it as a web app instead of a book is because I am a software developer and was able to include professional audio narration with automatic word highlighting, I also added shadowing, and AI to it. I am currently working on adding a quiz section at the end of every chapter. I plan on doing the same for the Spanish version. Spanish is just too popular not to do it. This really is the best way to learn a language and seeing Cloin is also doing it is so great. We need more of this style of language teaching.
@@Sochi-app Oh, I didn't realize your username was the name of the website. I've just found it. Thank you for your work
@@nicholaslemosdecarvalho5328 My pleasure and thank you for checking it out.
Very nice! Your project looks really well done - congratulations!
Longtime lurker here. I have been eagerly awaiting Oswald for what feels like centuries. I really love LOGOS for Ancient Greek, I can't wait to compare the effectiveness of the different pedagogical styles
I'm currently trying to learn Latin through Lingva Latina per se Illustrata. One of the things I really like about the book is that the stories are genuinely interesting.
Hi, Colin. Greetings from Colombia! I just found your channel last week and have enjoyed your perspective a lot.
I study koine Greek, modern/biblical Hebrew, and live in Spanish (so learn something new almost every day).
I loved your point about making the reader a story. I've been trying to get through the Assimil B2 Hebrew book for a while. I like their method, except it's hard to just study random topics with no plot.
אני שונא את זה! עם סיפור זה יהיה הרבה יותר קל!
6:00 yussss thank you. Pimsluer Japanese was terrible for this. Introducing the words for daughter, son, and basically all relationship terms jammed me up so bad because of the overlap in meaning and sounds.
Courses are still consistently bad about this, despite it being a pretty well-known problem in language learning.
I will look forward to seeing how reading Osweald Bera compares with my Lingua Latina and Athenaze experiences. I think LLPSI is an inspired work of genius, despite some elements we might quibble with. I thought Athenaze [the English, not Italian version] was just a grammar-translation book dressed up with a story. I showed your video introducing Osweald to my Latin students, and they had fun figuring out what the Old English meant.
The italian version is way better, but you'll have to look up the italian glosses in english
I agree with everything you said. I noticed when studying with something like Teach Yourself books that when opposites were introduced in the same lesson I'd invariably mix them up, then have to resort to mnemonics to get them straight. In university, I worked in a psycho-linguistics lab, and several of the experiments we ran were about this as well, measuring how much harder it was for people to recall things that were too similar semantically.
This is probably the most useful YT video I've seen in a while! Well done, Colin! I really loved your points about avoiding grammatical, and thematic sequencing. I find that these make readers for modern languages like Poco a poco and Le français seconde la méthode nature unsatisfactory resources. If you're familiar with these readers, I would love to hear what your thoughts are :) I have always wanted to create a graded reader for Brazilian Portuguese since I have not been able to find one, and this video has really inspired me to seriously consider taking on this project. Also, are there any good graded readers for Mandarin Chinese that you would suggest? Thanks!
Thank you very much! I agree with you about the early "Nature Method" readers like Poco a poco etc. I think they were a big step forward for their time but I find the thematic sequencing suboptimal. The stories also tend to be boring and often disconnected, which doesn't help either. I'd read the heck out of a Brazilian Portuguese version! For Mandarin I like the Imagin8 Press "Journey to the West" series. They're very good!
@@ColinGorrie Well, if and when I make a Brazilian Portuguese graded reader, you'll be the first person I send it to! And thank you so much for the Mandarin suggestion 🙏
Something in my comment keeps getting filtered by RUclips so I’m going to try splitting it up into a few, sorry if it’s annoying. 😅
I used Athenaze for ancient Greek and found it introduced about 20 new words per lesson.
My experience of Italian Athenaze is that it is a bit too ambitious with how many words it introduces in each chapter. I've never done the stats though. There's an interesting blog post from Magister P. about this, although it used the English Athenaze: the author found that the first chapter introduced 73 items, 20 of which were verbs. Source: magisterp.com/2017/02/08/cant-read-greek-unsurprised-but-angry/
Yes, I'm a long time Greek student and I found the vocab jumps between chapters (the IT version) to be a bit ridiculous. It didn't help that I had to look the glosses up by hand because I don't know Italian.
@@ZackSkrip I learned UItalian as a research language but used the English Athenaze back in the early 1990's. Previously the uni had used a series called "Reading Greek" which really did not introduce the language at all. TBH I was greatly pleased with Athenaze.
8:54 what you're describing here is the difference between an analytical approach (red, yellow, blue introduced together because they form their own class when you analyze them) and holistic approach (red, fire truck and blood introduced together because they're all similar in some way)
Hey, Colin! Just today I did my preinscription for a TEFL career, so your content about language learning will help me a lot!
Perhaps you’re sick of my comments but I really can’t wait for Osweald Bera! I wish there was a way I could preorder it because I definitely would 😂. I check like every day while I have a second at work to see if it’s out!
You’re so kind! I just learned yesterday that preorders are going to open on Nov 1, so not too long at all now!
@@ColinGorrie That's news worth spreading!
Can't agree more on your last point. Very few graded readers are actually enjoyable to read
Also, having an actual story and thus genre makes it easier to use words and grammar in a more natural context. You don't need to contrive bizarre situations to explore the subjunctive, because, say, a detective story is almost tailor made for words related to appearance and time, while the majority of the text will be in past tense and subjunctive mood as the story follows people's past actions, desires and motivations
I would add another point: story complexity matters. It so happened that I never used a graded reader as an adult and learned the languages through grammar books and exposure, so I may be completely missing something, but text complexity and story complexity are kind of inversely dependent. A simple formulaic story may allow for a more complex text. Think "Conan the Barbarian". Words and structures Howard uses are far from simple and basic. Some of them are quite poetic. But the stories themselves are usually rather formulaic and simple. So even if you can't parse something you aren't lost. There is nowhere to be lost. On the contrary, a complex story requires a simple text. Think "The Big Sleep". Chandler wrote a dynamic story with twists and turns, but he rarely has sentences longer than five words and every grammatical structure is as textbook as it gets, so, again, you aren't lost and can always recover because gramatical relationships are never obscured by poetic choices
That's an excellent point about plot complexity being entirely unrelated to complexity of language! Come to think of it, Conan the Barbarian would be lots of fun in Old English...
Chinese has some of the best and most extensive graded learning materials from any of the languages I’ve tried.
Imagin8Press makes a version of Journey to the west that starts at 600 know words and the audio is over 30 hours long
It’s great for building up reading and listening stamina as a beginner and cementing vocab in long term memory, and there’s lots of other options for other vocab ranges.
What are your recommendations?
100% - I'm reading it myself right now!!
DuChinese seems the most popular in terms of value, interest, and amount of content.
Very interesting video and I can definitely agree that the plot, the story is very important. I teach Polish and English as foreign languages and graded readers work differently in this context. First, a graded reader is all at the same level. So an e.g. A2 student takes this book and everything is at A2 level - the grammar and vocabulary. Of course, it's impossible to predict which words the person knows, so there is no need to put emphasis on repetition (we might end up repeating those words the person already knows). It's important to keep them at the proper level, which is easier for the A1-B1 levels. As a guide we have topics that the student should be familiar with at each level, so it makes the vocabulary choice easier. Readers are not textbooks, Familia Romana is not a reader - it's a textbook. A reader should have also the grammar limited to the certain level, so the A2 student can read it without encountering new grammar. A reader is for reviewing, getting input, not learning. I agree that thematical chapters can be boring but that's why in teaching modern languages we do it gradually. So first you learn only a few colours and the rest comes later. That's true about every vocabulary group. So there will be a lesson on weather at every level from A1 to C2. Familia Romana bring grammar to around C1 level but vocabulary wise it's A2/B1 (it's less then 2000 words and C1 is around 10 000). Nevertheless LLPSI provides a framework, so there can be a reader for those who have read it till chapter XX. Such a reader should contain 98% of vocabulary that's already known and no new grammar. Otherwise it would become a textbook. As a learner I don't want to read a story (for extensive reading) which I have to read only after I have covered the whole grammar of the language or that introduces vocabulary in a way that I have to learn it in a way that's moving from one level to a higher, and another higher one etc. I want (and this is how it works in English) a story that I can read in the evening or two evenings, at the weekend. I', not sure if it was Krashen or P. Nation who researched that extensive reading should be even at a slightly lower lever (especially grammar wise) so that students' motivation is boosted up by the sense of achievement, those 2% of new vocabulary items easily acquired and (that's my observation) that students start learning syntax and a long term focus on a text. This is probably just another perspective, but as a Latin learner I see there are some IMHO false ideas about the levels of language acquisition (like the idea that LLPSI Familia Romana brings the student to C1 level as far as vocabulary is concerned) and that readers should be like Julia by Reeds or "Ora Maritima". They are materials that a teacher can use to enrich what a textbook offers but a graded reader is IMHO something different - it's a full story that's aimed at learners at a certain level and is an interesting story that they can read easily. Therefore both vocabulary and grammar have to be adapted to the level (be it A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 or C2).
Thanks, Colin, for your thoughts. From my own knowledge of language acquisition, I agree with all that you have shared......the limitation that I have found in my own learning (Swedish) at this point is that the graded readers are few and far between. If you have hints as to how to find them, I (and I bet others) would greatly appreciate your suggestions
I do want to learn Old English but now I'm even more interested in just reading your book!
Chambers, The Greek War of Independence is very good as a graded reader for Ancient Greek. The story is strong (if you like history) and he did a good job of repeating vocabulary.
Bookmarking this!
@@ColinGorrie it's on our list at the Greek Learner Texts Project
I know you're talking about beginners, but once you get to intermediate level, you just really have to throw yourself into the deep end to some extent and get stuck in with original texts and be prepared to refer to a good dictionary a lot. In my case, that was coming to terms with Caesar's DBG.
The narrative orientation versus the semantic field orientation makes sense, but I have considered it before.
What the world needs is "O familie romaneasca" 🙂
when is that book coming?????????? we need it. Plenty of manuals for Latin and Greek but very few for old English and none in this method.
I'm so surprised this came up in my feed it's like the algorithm knew I was reading Paul Nation haha
You had me at Old English.
must buy bear book 😵💫💸🧸📙
On point 1: You said that new words should take up only 2%-10% of the word count. I assume that means the total number of new words and the total number of words in the chapter, period, rather than the total number of unique new words and unique words in the chapter? Assuming it's the total word count, I assume your 5% new word budget doesn't involve having each new word just appear once, or having just one new word take up 5% of the chapter, so how do you find the balance between repeating a word and the number of unique new words introduced?
You're correct - the calculation is new lemmata / total running word count. As you point out, ideally you would repeat these new words to aid in their learning. I don't think there's a good set of guidelines for how many repetitions you need to learn a word. I suspect it varies a lot depending on how abstract the word is, whether it's a "cognate" (in the SLA sense, e.g. biologist / biólogo), whether it's introduced with distractors, etc. I suspect it's somewhere between 15-25 repetitions for most words but that's a gut instinct. Getting these repetitions without sacrificing the story is very difficult, which is why I think authors need to encourage rereading - and this means writing a story that holds up to rereading.
I assume you are moments away from uploading an OB launch video but I COULD NOT WAIT I had to come tell you that I am BARFING WITH EXCITEMENT I took the email to my boyfriend and said "THIS SHALL BE MY CHRISTMAS PRESENT"
Is your graded reader for Old English published? How much does one need to understand in order to utilize it?
Will Osweald Bera be print only?
I am learning italian and greek lol