I have been greatly influenced by the idea of consuming massive amounts of input in order to learn my target language. Not to take anything away from that vital activity, but …
In the case of Russian verbs of motion, after 4 years, I had never truly understood how they worked. I had a cursory understanding. Now that I’m actually sitting down and spending quite a lot of time working with them, I’m beginning to appreciate how little I truly understood — and how important it is to understand the true meaning behind the input.
Homework. Yikes! But it’s the price I’m having to pay to better understand the massive amounts of input.
Very true. As important as getting enough input is, to make the most of it you should supplement it with some grammar study to give you a framework with which to process this input. That’s how I choose to interpret it, anyway.
I wouldn’t sit down with a list of verb endings each day and hammer them into my brain, but I would look at them occasionally so that when they come across in the input, I don’t have to randomly guess why this specific verb ending is used but can making and educated guess “huh this is probably because it’s about being at a place / doing a thing / receiving a thing” or whatever.
Indeed, I can’t possibly imagine how I would ever have disambiguated these without explicit instruction. What finally worked for me was spending a fair amount of time writing pairs of similar sentences, one of which used a unidirectional form, one of which a multidirectional. Many of those I saved as anki cards.
I was looking over some childrens’ tales in a Native American language, and realized these tales were full of verbs of motion. The rabbit goes here, there, over, under, back and forth, hops to the river and over the log every day, etc.
The repetition of listening to an elder in the tipi tell these stories all winter, with gestures, are no doubt what made the verbs of motion sink in.
On Lingq we are looking at a screen, not watching a live storyteller, not instinctively using the gestures of Native American sign language. We don’t feel the movement of verbs of motion like a little kid who is watching an adult.
Maybe if we could sit for story hour with a live storyteller every day, the verbs of motion would sink in through comprehesible input. I’m not sure daily story hour would work as well on a computer screen. For one thing, it’s much more fun to watch animations on a screen than static video of a storyteller. The gestures of movement may not be as important in an animated video as the images depicting the scene-- images which we describe more using adjectives and nouns.
Overall I’m finding kids’ videos are not quite enough to fully grasp the verbs of motion, The kids’ stories/videos help, but I still need to look over the grammar sometimes.
BTW, the Russian Radio Show guy has a video on three of them (нести/носить, везти/возить, вести/водить) in which he uses his dog and his backpack to help, and in which he goes over some of the переносные значенея in the second half:
Wow! Thank you for the suggestion. I was running out of Russian content that captured my interest, This piece on verbs of motion is exactly what I was thinking about for illustrating verbs through gesture.
If you guys find more videos like this, please share them!