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Notes on Learning Languages

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Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#21

Post by guai888 »

tasogare wrote: post #20
Funes- wrote: post #16

As others have already noted, vocabulary is the most important aspect with regards to learning a language to a good-enough extent; that is, with regards to making oneself capable of constructing sentences (as non-grammatical as they may be, or as unconventional as they may sound to a native or to a fluent individual, in spite of being deemed "technically correct") that can be understood by other people competent in a…

> vocabulary acquisition shouldn't be constrained to the typical or more salient nouns and adjectives My recent research finding (that needs to be confirmed with new data I collected) is that East-Asian L2 learners of English have a gap in knowledge of adjectives/adverbs in comparison of nouns. The nouns causing them problem are in the 3000 frequency vocabulary band while the adj/adv they don’t know are in the 2000 f…

Vocabulary acquisition is not easy. Human remember things through story. Initial phase of the vocabulary acquisition is very difficult since you need to remember one word at the time and it is very easy to forget. Once you have enough vocabulary to read sentence and progress to understand story then you have better chance to retain vocabulary at faster pace and less likely to forget the word.

Listening is also a skill that people overlook. You need to train the ear to pick up how people pronounce a specific language otherwise it will just sound like noise. Let me give you an example: I have a 4 years old son. He likes cartoon. English speaking cartoon sounds like garbled noise to him. I know because he try to recreate the conversation and it came out like garbled noise. I prompt him with some word with Chinese translation before he watch video then gradually he can recognize the word in the video and gave me correct translation after I asked him.

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#22

Post by kerng »

adrianN wrote: post #13
kerng wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not read the article and agree that vocabulary is crucial. However just trying to memorize vocabulary is not the best approach. The reason is that it's hard to memorize vocabulary without associating certain emotions and experiences with them. Actually using the language daily, even if you only know 100 words is the most important part. You will learn and memorize new words much quicker that way. Another good p…

If you have someone with the iron patience needed to converse with you using a heavily restricted vocabulary: awesome. For the casual home learner I recommend learning words in context. For example using something like https://digitalwords.net/anki/tatoeba-audio/index.eng.html , or a hand-mined deck with sentences from things you read or heard. I've made good progress by reading the news and children's books and addi…

Great resources.

I can also recommend language exchange platforms as a great tool to make new friends and have regular conversations and practice speaking in foreign languages.

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#23

Post by jacksonkmarley »

The argument against needing to learn vocabulary seems to ignore the problem of understanding native speakers who are talking to you. I can certainly say a lot of things with some creative use of a small vocab, but I won't have a clue what people are saying to me.

More generally, I think language learning can be a bit like dieting, in that there are a lot of complicated individual factors, and the method that works for a given person is the one that motivates them and that they actually persist with.

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#24

Post by gokhan »

Having watched my children learning foreign languages, I believe there's no single way of doing it, hence the article is somewhat quick to reach conclusions.

My son was not interested in learning a foreign language until 8, we bribed him with a long summer holiday in US that year if he consistently reach a daily goal in English on Duolingo (30 or 50 xp, I can't remember). He did that for six months and when he got comfortable with the language, we also bought a Kindle and bombarded him with books and videos. Two and a half years later at 10 yo, he scored 690/800 on SAT. He's a scientific thinking person, quite intelligent, loves working on math olympiad problems and consumes insane amount of content in English from YouTube. But he doesn't have a photographic memory and not interested in learning another language, maybe Gaelic as an unknown-to-us inside joke in his math olympian community.

My daughter is 8. She can speak English, German very well along with Turkish as the native language. She's working on Chinese now. For German she used Duolingo daily, every second-hand Lustiges Taschenbuch we can acquire in Turkey, Die Maus on iPad, channels from YouTube (from Peppa Pig in German to Checker Can|Tobi|Julian) etc [1]. When she first actually talked in German for an hour, it was after more than two years from starting learning it, and she managed almost perfectly according the lady she was talking with. She's not that much interested in science as my son, totally not into math, more of an athlete/jumper/dancer with way less attention span. Language learner is one of the identities she describes herself with.

For my two children with two different personalities, consistent daily introductory work on Duolingo or similar apps followed with lots of online content worked really well.

[1] In terms of quality (but not quantity) of the resources, we found German is much better than English for kids.

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#25

Post by lgessler »

type0 wrote: post #14
lgessler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perpetuating racial stereotypes isn't inappropriate?

In this case it's a positive cultural stereotype not a racial one.

It is a racial stereotype, because it literally invokes race. It's also not positive if it helps reinforce beliefs that Asians are unreflective drones that are good at piano and math but lack personality and originality.

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#27

Post by type0 »

lgessler wrote: post #25
type0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case it's a positive cultural stereotype not a racial one.

It is a racial stereotype, because it literally invokes race. It's also not positive if it helps reinforce beliefs that Asians are unreflective drones that are good at piano and math but lack personality and originality.

> It's also not positive if it helps reinforce beliefs that Asians are unreflective drones that are good at piano and math but lack personality and originality.

That's just like, your opinion, man

Re: Notes on Learning Languages

#28

Post by marethyu »

cambalache wrote: post #17
adrianN wrote: post #2

No, vocabulary is the most important part of learning a language if you want to use to it to actually communicate, or consume media in that language. And learning vocabulary takes a lot of time. You can join exactly zero conversations about everyday topics without knowing at least a few hundred, better a few thousand words. You can't even read stories for toddlers without knowing a few hundred words. Grammar won't he…

Hard disagree. Give me a person with great pronunciation, ability to differentiate minimal pairs and decent grammar with only 400 words in their repertoire and they will be better language users in no time than any person with a +5000 vocabulary but crappy grammar and pronunciation. Vocabulary is the easiest part to get by daily usage, for the others you have to do a conscious and constant effort.

I think it depends on how you learn vocabulary. If somebody learns a bunch of vocabulary on context, then he will naturally acquire grammar and pronunciation compared to somebody who learns off context.
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