I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
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Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#2I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension.
What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand most of the words but may not catch the full meaning.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#3I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
> you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension.
disagree. from what i experience, some of the most helpful parts of reading are when you stop and take a minute to ponder the words, or write it in the side column. Thats the main downside to audiobooks imo, you dont have time to stop and think. That applies whether you just use audiobook or audiobook + reading text, but not in the caze of just reading.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#4I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
Wow, even with subtitles vs movie audio I have a hard time not just turning it into a reading session where I forgot the voice audio is there. Maybe it's different without the visual element behind the subtitles, I'll have to give it a try.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#5I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
The author mentioned using polish translations of English books, so he already knew, at least roughly, what the book is about. This way, reading and listening in the target language makes a lot of sense.
It’s the same when watching foreign TV. Having subtitles on in the same language that is spoken is really useful, you learn more than only reading or only listening.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#6When learning Spanish, I found it very useful to re-read books I had originally read in English in Spanish.
You already know the context so can fill in the gaps. Something about this process felt closer to the natural way you learn language growing up and helped develop my intuition for the languages grammar and vocab. I quickly found myself saying words I didn’t know I knew and using tenses I hadn’t yet started actively learning.
Reading aloud was also great for pronunciation as your mouth/tongue is effectively doing “reps” for kind of sound combinations of the language (which are often different to the sound combinations of your own language)
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#7I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
Yeah, I'm not buying it being useful at all for learning a language as such. For getting used to target language sounds and relating those sounds to a text, it seems good, though.
The key to learning is comprehensible input. You want to understand 98% of what you're reading. You can get that through repeatedly reading the same things, through graded readers, and through the use of bilingual dictionaries. Once you get to the point when you can make a switch to interesting arbitrary target language reading using only a target language dictionary, it becomes a virtuous circle and simply a matter of time.
If the orthography of a language is weird, I could see this being useful to get to the next step, but as far as I know Polish orthography is straightforward (unlike English, French, or Chinese for example.)
edit: on second thought, it might help with acquiring the prosody of Polish even if you're just listening (and hopefully reading along out loud) to the sounds like a dog would. Prosody is half the battle.
edit2: also translations are a pretty bad idea. You're trying to pick up the prosody of Polish, but you're reading people trying to imitate English in Polish. Unless it's a very free translation to the point that it distorts the original work. Just find out what Polish people are doing; their cultural references are part of the language anyway.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#8This is very relevant to me, I am also in the middle of learning Polish and in attempt to fast-track learning, I've started watching cartoons in Polish with polish captions on (The 90s cartoon X-Men is particularly great po polsku!)
I am not quite at the level of full reading books in Polish but am about to take a full-time summer course in Krakow and I'm really hoping to come out of it a couple levels higer.
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#9I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
Yeah, I'm not buying it being useful at all for learning a language as such. For getting used to target language sounds and relating those sounds to a text, it seems good, though. The key to learning is comprehensible input. You want to understand 98% of what you're reading. You can get that through repeatedly reading the same things, through graded readers, and through the use of bilingual dictionaries. Once you get…
That's basically what they did with this blitz thing
> To translate, you'll rely on your existing knowledge, quick look-ups, context clues, and the audiobook's narration (inflection, pacing, etc.).
Re: I "Blitzed" 50 Books in 50 Days – My Experiment in Language Learning
#10I'm a little puzzled by this because if you understand the language well enough to comprehend the meaning of sentences, I don't think having the text in front of you is adding much. Unless you just really struggle with listening comprehension. What I have done is listen to a foreign language audiobook while having the text in English, which I find extraordinarily helpful at an intermediate level where you understand…
Wow, even with subtitles vs movie audio I have a hard time not just turning it into a reading session where I forgot the voice audio is there. Maybe it's different without the visual element behind the subtitles, I'll have to give it a try.
Heck, even with English audio and Japanese subtitles, I end up reading (Japanese is my third language).