Hello everyone, It has been two months since I bought LingQ. After my previous unsuccessful grammar-based English learning experiences, I started working again with a different learning system (reading and listening). There is a very important issue that I am curious about;
it is stuck in my head and bothers me. I am not sure if I am doing it the right way or if I am on the wrong path. I do not want to go back to the beginning and experience the same things again. That is why I wanted to ask on the forum. In other words, I am looking for a clear answer here
Please, if experienced friends who know more than one language answer, I would be very happy
The issue is this: I am Turkish and English has a very opposite structure compared to our language. When you are getting a meaningful translation from a sentence, one word can be at the end, one word in the middle, and one word at the beginning. In other words, it is really difficult to read quickly from left to right, it is very
frustrating. When I read, in order to understand the sentence, I can combine words from the end and the beginning and make such a meaningful translation into my native language. Is this a wrong move, can someone tell me?
Should I force myself and read from left to right? I hope my question is understood.
Of course, I am aware of this, everyone who learns a foreign language encounters this situation. But I wonder what people do in this situation. Those who learn Turkish and Japanese later probably experience the exact opposite of what I experienced.
In this case, how should a beginner (A1) do correct and useful reading technically? What should I pay attention to or what should I do that would be better for me?
Am I right to assume that your post is a machine translation from Turkish?
When we begin a new language, everything is new, and there is so much to learn. Obviously opinions disagree, but my belief is that it doesn’t really matter too much how we study at the start, what matters most is that we gain a foundation, with some words and some grammar, and that we work consistently. The early stages are hard because we know so little and it looks so incomprehensible.
There are going to be many opinions on what you should be doing. But I suspect that most of us would agree that it is best to consume simple input at your level, and only look up grammar when you need to. By all means get an overview of the grammar, but don’t memorise it. Keep on consuming input, and don’t worry too much that you have to spend time figuring out the meaning.
I’m afraid you will find English weird. I find with German that I often have to read a sentence many times, and think about each part until it makes sense. Turkish would be much harder. Over time it becomes natural, and you get used to the weird way those foreign people speak.
I have listened to turkish mini lesson. Turkish sounds great. I have learned one word “sabah” : morning if I’m correct.
You wrote : it is really difficult to read quickly from left to righ
Just don’t force yourself. Read at your own pace.
I’m learning Ukrainian. When I started reading, I was reading letter by letter because I was not familiar with the alphabet. I got the feeling of being back to school as a five year old kid.
Something really important with langague learning is not having too high expectations. Then you get frustrated and then demotivated.
You don’t have to read fast. It will come with time.
You don’t have to understand everything. At the beginning if you understand a little bit that’s already great.
There are what I name islands of difficulties. It’s something that looks very hard to you now. Put it aside for now. It will become easier at a later stage.
For Ukrainian, during a few monthes, I was reading during 20 minutes a day. The most the read the most you anticipate the words. Result was improved reading speed and clarity of what I read.
If it’s difficult it indicates you are trying to progress faster than you can learn. Do simpler things and enjoy small victories of understanding a word, a set of words, recognizing one word in a movie.
If it’s painfull go slower.
I may share my experiences on that matter, learning a language very different in grammar and syntax from those I already know.
In the beginning I’ve learned mainly by books that use simple, short example sentences. I’d discovered LingQ later on. It is actually helpful to not start with overly complex stuff, as this means the grammatical differences will not be such a burden. More complex content may cause you to learn faster, but you really need a high frustration tolerance than.
When I translate, which I did more in the beginning and these days only if I can’t understand the sentence otherwise, I keep the word order. This is a bit odd in the beginning, but it helped me to getting used to the different word order and sentence structure.
I would generelly avoid translating the sentence and first of try to actually understand it. This is difficult in the beginning when one lacks vocabulary and grammar knowledge, but if you always aim for meaningful translations, you are doing more then is needed, have to permanently jump back and forth between two languages and are more or less stuck in the thinking of your native language, which is dominates your thinking anyways.
I am also a beginner learner, I am learning Mandarin which shares some similarities with my native language of English, in particular the Subject-Verb-Object order. However, sentences are still often constructed in a different order between the languages.
In English the question: “What is your name?”
English word order: WHAT. IS. YOUR. NAME.
Chinese word order: YOUR. IS. WHAT. NAME.
Although the actual words used is also a little bit different. When I am reading I continue to read left to right, understanding and memorizing each word in the sentence. At the end of the sentence, I have memorized a collection of words and use context and intuition to understand the sentence and naturally “translate” a summary of the meaning of the sentence in my head.
This is not a recommendation that you should follow my example, I don’t know if this is the correct thing to do either, but it is just what I am doing naturally.
In my opinion, I wouldn’t worry about doing things the “correct” way, I would just focus on building up vocabulary and having natural exposure to common sentence structures as you go.
I think over time you will build an intuition for sentence structure and it will become easier to understand. Plus, I feel a lot of the time native speakers of a language can to some degree understand sentences even if they are spoken out of order.
If someone asked me my name in English but using the sentence structure of Mandarin, I would still understand the question and when I have spoken in very broken Chinese, I am usually still able to get my message across - the biggest problem is usually just using the wrong words entirely.
I think there is not much that can be done while reading. I still wanted to ask, maybe someone approaches this situation differently.
I can do it in two ways. Either try to read the sentence from left to right as you said and I think you need to get used to it.
The second way of reading is to arrange the words in a mixed way from one end of the sentence to the other, from the beginning to the middle and again from the end. To extract something meaningful. But my feelings tell me that doing it this way is wrong.
Yes, I think I will have a certain intuitive understanding after enough time. I hope so.
