How and When to Learn the Basics of a Language
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- Опубликовано: 19 окт 2024
- The basics are most effectively learned after we have had some exposure to the language, or rather, a lot of exposure to the language. Before that, trying to learn the basics is an uphill struggle.
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I'm native Polish and I'm glad to hear that you start learning our language, good luck Steve!
Hi Stephen. Good video. A point you might find interesting:
To demonstrate your point, I would ask people to reflect on the difference in difficulty in learning the grammatical rules of one's native language and one's L2/L3 etc.
When I was studying French, I found the grammar easy to figure out but impossible to remember - and even when I did remember the rule I could rarely apply it.
When I began training as an ESL teacher, I needed to learn the grammar of my native language (which we are not taught at all in school - with an honors degree, I never even heard of the "past perfect" let alone reported speech).
However, to my pleasant surprise, within two weeks, I had mastered all the basic grammar in my native language and could notice these "rules" when listening and speaking. Within a few more weeks, I was studying more advanced English Grammar.
Why was French grammar almost impossible for me to learn in any meaningful way while English Grammar was extremely easy? Well, with the latter I had built up a strong intuitive understanding of the grammar beforehand. I knew what sounded right/wrong. So all I needed to do was attach explicit grammatical rules to my intuition. This is much easier than trying to remember a rule that you never used.
I think you can relax with the disclaimers about using LingQ, I think a lot of your viewers will be using it as well.
I have different, but somewhat similar, approach. I expose myself to the language, listen, read, LingQ, write etc, but I'm also learning slowly with textbook in my French classes and they help me just to fill in the gaps while learning mostly at LingQ and a little at th other websites.
Same experience. First learn to speak, read, write and then The Complete textbook. Great way to go about it.
The first 20 seconds freely translated into Finnish: (Any reference languages or familiar words at this point? Anyone?)
"Terve siellä! Tänään haluan puhua perusteiden opiskelemisesta kielessä.
Me kuulemme aina ihmisten sanovan, että teidän täytyy ensin oppia perusasiat ja jos teillä on perusteet, niin teillä on vankka perusta ja josta voitte, tiedättehän, ennen pitkää oppia tulemaan sujuvaksi. On hyvin tärkeää aloittaa perusteiden opiskelusta.
Minä olen eri mieltä!"
Good points, Steve. I will have to watch this video again.
I imported your text into LingQ and was able to follow by LingQing every word. Of course I was helped by knowing more or less what it was about. Normally I would spend a month or so with simpler material from the LingQ Finnish library before starting authentic material. I might leaf through a grammar book in the first week or so, but would wait a few months before digging deeper into the grammar, by which time my curiosity would be greater and I would have some points of reference.
I really appreciate your approach on language acquisition. I don't like those uncomplex beginner's books and very slowly spoken audio tapes in apparently every audio material you can get for language learners. Exposure to the language how it is in reality is hard at the beginning but is worth while when you're more proficient.
In my French lessons in class, we didn't learn about the subjonctif first, later I was kind of confused when it came up. I think you should expose yourself to the language like if you were in a foreign country because this obviously is the best way of learning. To me, the proof of that is that I wasn't able to formulate any English sentence or understand English speakers until I started to watch English TV and to read English books. In school, I did very bad and wouldn't understand simple speech or grammar, nor was I interested in learning. When I took Latin in school, I started by learning every verb form and declination that exists, nothing would shock me thenceforward.
But contrary to you, I'm a "grammar lover" ( To express it that way.^^). My interest is in grammatical structures, and so the first thing I did when starting off with Japanese was to read through a grammar book. I found that entertaining and I got more interested in learning the language because it's just so different from what I had known, already. Also, at first I've listened to anime without understanding a single word and then continually praised myself for every bit I understood as I went further into the language. That approach, also on theory, works out perfectly for me. :D
I don't have the impression it works for most learners, though.
Hi Steve, thank you for the video! I just want to note there may be a situation when one had already heard
ead a lot in foreign language before ever started learning it. I'm from Russia and people over here are exposed to English in everyday life (since 1990s). We watch Hollywood movies, lots of commercials, listen to Western music, play video games (they often go with no translation), and btw we learn English in school (not always well). You've probably noticed that many Russians can understand English a little and say a phrase or two, especially the yonger guys, who were growing up after the Iron Curtain era. That's because the majority of people here heard a lot of English speech and took some lesson in school.That's why I think that a Russian speaker learning English can skip exposure step and start with the basics.
Sure, if a Russian speaker wants to learn Greek or Hindi (very exotic for Russia) it's a good idea to get exposed to the language first.
Thanks Steve! I can see your point! I really must try to just tune into a foreign language (online/internet) radio channel, or find some easy video content, (childrens level?), and get some easy reading books, such as the Grimm's fairy tales, or such, translated into the target language), and then just watch/listen to/read lots and lots of it , so that my eyes, ears, and thoughts, start to assimilate the cadences, and the requisite vocalizations that are needed - to become embedded into our minds, before we will be able to really digest a lot of new words (vocabulary). The most difficult thing to manage, is the TIME needed to do these things on a regular basis!
totally agree, thank you for sharing your knowledge and your unique experience.
I may be biased since Turkish is my native language. But I imagine it'd be harder to start right away and notice the patterns in agglutinative languages. Regardless, good luck!
Dear Steve, in some point i do agree with you, that after getting exposure of the language it's painless to learn basics, but if you are an English speaker and trying to learn spanish i respectfully disagree with you. When i was learning polish I did listenings for 30-45 mins a day and thanks to my russian i started to understand 80-90% of tv programs in 5 months. However i couldn't do the same with French. I did listenings for 3-4 hours a day at Lingq and using some other resources, and after 3 months i realized that I am nowhere and therefore I had to change my approach. Maybe it works for you, because you're more experienced, but i don't think it'd work for a lot of people.
I started using LingQ for learning Korean and I really am enjoying it! I have been doing a lot of listening there and there is one thing I learned from it: do not translate all the time from foreign language to native language. What I mean is, even if I cannot accurately provide an English translation for what I heard or read, as long as I understand the meaning, it's okay. Do you agree with this?
?Absolutely, even if you don't understand all that clearly, it doesn't matter. Just keep reading, listening and LingQing, things will clear up, as you become more and more familiar with the language.
Hi, Steve. I totally agree with what you said. In my case, it took me 4 years of speaking japanese to start actually learning grammar (I spent those 4 years speaking to native speakers but never payed too much attention to grammar but now that I started learning it I noticed that I was already using it!). But my question is: what should you do once you have a certain level of proficiency? Text books won't help much and my conversations with native speakers tend to be inside my confort zone. How do I get out that zone? How do I learn new words or grammar rules?
Thank you.
Moi, je vais profiter de votre experience surtout que je commence a apprendre l'italien et ce que je peux dire: apprendre le vocabulaire de base me facilite la comprehension mais je le fais en meme temps avec cette "exposure". Dans mon cas ca marche trop bien!
I think I understand now how your technique works. Exposure to the language lessens intimidation. You condition your mind so it eventually absorbs more stuff than one who begins with the basics but has less experience with the language.
As always, I appreciate your point of view, and agree with most of what you say, if not all of it. Regarding the word 'exposure', I would like to hear you speak more about that. The word is also used for bad weather conditions. Not very comfortable there--in fact, life threatening. So my question is: how can you expose yourself to a language without too much pain and danger, if your tolerance to being in a language of which you know very little is very low. Myself, I easily become frustrated in such a situation. How do you relax for a long enough time that you can accumulate those essential exposure-hours?
I start with lessons at LingQ then move to resources I find on the web and can import into LingQ. I listen when I can, in the car, doing dishes, and read and save LingQs in the evening.
Brilliant!
Good video, i drop my motivation for learning the language i read before , i want to learn but im to lazy the last couple of month, any tip to get back the motivation? Maby dumb question but yea...
I do not understand how it is possible to understand interesting texts without knowing the basics of the language, like basic grammar. In languages with a strong morphology, like Russian or Polish, I think often it is not even possible to look up a word in a dictionary and translate it without knowing the conjugation and declension rules, because you then do not know where this word derives from and what function it fulfills.
And I think if you do not learn some theory about the phonology of a language, you are just confused by listening and reading and cannot match the sounds to the letters.
I think the problem is that Steve doesn't explain what 'exposure' to the language is exactly. Is it just listen and read or starting to learn words and then grammar and conjugation, grammar and conjugation being the 'basics'?
Some say that beginners also need to learn pronunciation to
recognize & distinguish words
while doing massive exposure.
I don t think the method exposed here is possible for learning arabic ( if you don't know a related language already). Arabic is tough
I'm learning Arabic right now. Enjoying it and it seems to work OK.
Is Polish going to make you a polyglot if 15 languages?
Polish won't prove anything about your system because the grammar is very much like Russian (and I assume Czech). Good language to learn though :)
I'm polish and you're wrong. Polish is completely diffrent
Piotr - I'm learning both languages and the similarities are huge. Almost identical case system and lots of shared vocabulary. The similarities are not always helpful, but they'll certainly be enough to stop Polish from being a fresh slate to test learning theories on if the learner already knows Russian.
ElseMush
Do you also mean polish signs are simillar to russian ? I'm polish and I don't understand most of them speech. Only Polish and Slovakian understand each other effortlessly (nearly ;))
No, I'm just saying that the grammar is similar, especially at the start. Without relistening to Steve's video, I seem to remember his point was something about learning Polish being a test for his theory about not needing to learn the grammar at the start. I say it's untrue, because he already has some idea of Russian grammar, which is very similar. Maybe later it isn't similar, but at the initial levels, which is what we're talking about, the grammar is pretty much identical.