read 3 million words and then make a decision
For me, lessons are definitely worth it. In my private lesson, we focus on speaking-casual conversation, learning to make my speech pattern more Russian vs. sounding American. In group lesson we focus on grammar in addition to speaking Russian. My teacher also pushed me to learn to write cursive Russian-something I wrote off as too difficult. But I really didnt have a problem learning cursive. Every now and then my teacher has me do a handwritten assignment.
I can’t tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not. Are you saying I should make a decision now, as opposed to when I have already learnt everything?
I saw “handwritten assignment” and automatically don’t want to. Not only because I’m afraid of cursive Russian, but I just hate writing in general.
No sarcasm intended. Just wanted to share how I have found lessons helpful.
Not all teachers will do this. I think how you approach language learning really depends on your goals and your own personal situation. The advantage for me is that in individual lessons we focus on where I need to improve.
it wasnt meant as sarcasm. if you read 3M words then you will be a good reader and can understand written language without even thinking. you will also be able to understand spoken language well before 3M words (in terms of vocabulary but not necessarily listening practice). then if you feel the need to understand why the language is structured a certain way or need to fine tune grammar, then a teacher/lessons can fill in the gaps. you dont need a teacher to get the foundation.
langauge is a skill that needs practice and reptition to create reliable subconscious processes. its not something that you should spend lots of energy consciously memorizing rules.
Yes, I meant “aronald.” Thanks for the advice.
Reading is SOOOO important. I felt hopeless when I was trying to memorize grammar rules. Having had the lessons in grammar, I can now read and say oh yeah dative case here, genitive here.
this is exactly my point. good reading skills gives context and a deeper understanding when learning grammar than just A needs B in situations when C happens, and D needs E when F happens. Oh was it supposed to be A or C?? Let me check my notes.
If I read меня нравится I would have a heart attack. It’s a simple example but extends to more complex grammar.
hahahahha
See here’s the thing: I didn’t do any grammar for french and it worked for what I wanted (watching TV and youtube). So I didn’t have any idea how much of a lift I got from already knowing Spanish. I suspected some.
What I noticed with French (and it’s actually exactly the same with Russian) is that there are stages of comprehension. Gradually your comprehension builds up just with a combination of watching youtube plus drilling words. This has worked with Russian also, just slower. Somewhere between one and half times as slow and twice as slow. I did do lingQ mini stories also with Russian so did that work or not? Who knows. LingQ kept me sane because the initial 3,000 words drilling took ages with Russian, unlike with French.
What’s different with Russian is I would like to Speak. And given that I haven’t spent any time figuring that one out I’m doing it now. I’m concluding that I disagree with Steve: he says just doing input will allow you to speak. I don’t think that’s true with a grammar heavy distant language like Russian. I think you probably need grammar for that. Although, maybe Steve is right. He’s doing a form of the Benny Lewis method which is learn speaking by speaking when he’s ready. He just starts talking to people (horribly at first).
I can speak but it’s horrible. So maybe if I spent time speaking with people I would in fact be able to do it. But I’d rather not go through a couple months of me being embarrased. I’d rather be able to speak at least at an elementary school level, so my hypothesis is the missing magic sauce is grammar classes.
EDIT: also when I say my speaking is “horrible” I mean my grammar. My pronunciation is pretty good for a native English speaker I believe.
I go for Russian lessons at the local Russian community center. I go early so I have a chance to chat with the parents who are waiting for their kids. I am shy so I sometimes have to force myself to talk, but it definitely helps me improve my speech.
While you will likely hit 10 repetitions of 10,000 words and therefore be epically fluent in your understanding of the written language, how long will this take?
Where is the minimum? Is it really as high as a million words or more?
I believe the top part (if you read 3M words you will be fluent in the written language. Not just fluent but expert).
Explain, however, how you believe learning to read makes you able to understand the spoken language?
IMO it does not. On the contrary I’d say it’s the other way around. Learn to understand the spoken language first then learn to read.
I’d be interested to hear your position.
PS: I’m specifically stating that reading only includes absolutely no listening at all. If you’re saying a combination of listening and reading when you say “reading” I have a different position.
Yeah I believe this works. I did a flavor of that when I learned Spanish initially. I essentially immersed myself in the Mexican community after I had a baseline number of words of vocabulary, along with watching a ton of telenovelas.
Thanks for sharing your experience. There is some overlap with mine.
I tried both French and Spanish the old fashioned way, I took classes in each. In both cases it failed miserably.
My Spanish was brute force memorize 6,000 written words using a precursor SRS tool called supermemo instead of anki. I could understand nothing at all when I finished so I had to learn the hard way by immersing myself in the language. In a sense, my experience aligns with your statement of already having the vocabulary as written words. I got there but it took upwards of a year and a half before I was fluent spoken.
I tried Japanese and German and French on and off until I found Benny Lewis and gradually came to the conclusion that it would be much faster learning the vocabulary as audio instead of written words precisely because the sounds of the words don’t match how they are written. Plus the fact that babies don’t learn to read, they learn to understand by listening. That is my working hypothesis.
I tested it with French and it worked. I have tested it with Russian and it is in the progresss of working.
Caveat: I think it works for listening comprehension. The “speaking” part is up for debate.
Your French experience aligns exactly with mine probably with the exception that I learned it almost purely by audio. So my listening comprehension is awesome.
My Russian has followed the same process as French in the same order and has worked in the same order albeit at a slower speed.
I’m not sure but I’ve read like 1.5M in Russian and don’t feel like I’ve hit that point yet. There is such a large degree of diminishing returns due to sparser and sparser words encountered for lower and lower frequency, but if my goal was spoken fluency then 1.5M words would be sufficient for high B1/ low B2 conversation.
Since listening and reading are different skills, they need to be practiced separately. I think we can both agree on that. That’s why I put the part:
“in terms of vocabulary but not necessarily listening practice”
So it depends on how each person wants to distribute their time. If the goal is conversation, then it makes sense to listen more than read. The catch is that I think it’s easier to digest information and learn vocab through reading rather than listening because you can control the speed and click on words for definition. So the words consumed per minute (assuming you know the definition of the word before moving onto the next one) is much higher in reading than listening. You can also listen to the audio while reading and improve both skills. This doesn’t mean that listening without audio will be easy, but if you have the text then you can choose to look at it and away from it from time to time or when you feel that you’re becoming lost (training wheels).
Also, I think spoken words are a subset of written words in terms of information. By that I mean that if you know the written word then you’ll usually have a good idea of how to say it. Obviously that is sometimes language dependent (English and French aren’t always consistent), but knowing the written word will get you in the right direction. Plus, knowing the written word will help memorize the sound and that’ll make producing the sound easier.
Lastly, even though the three major language skills (reading, listening, and speaking) require dedicated time for each, there is a lot of overlap and so I choose a process that is more enjoyable and semi-logical and that’s reading heavy at the beginning (with and without audio, which mainly depends on how easily I can find the audio, but I don’t let that limit me), and then a transition to listening heavy once I can read quickly and easily to conversational level material, and then transition to speaking when I feel like I want to round out my language skills. I’ve never really been very concerned with speaking but I like to get my languages to a point where I’ll only need a couple of months to activate a lot of the words that I already know.
For each language that I learn, I want to reach a reading level that allows me to easily read B1 material at a very fast rate (reading a 2000-word lesson in 15-20 mins). So until I reach that point, I’m not very concerned with listening. Being able to digest simple information (B1 level) at this speed will help my brain process spoken words as well. So it’s worth getting the reading part figured out since it’ll benefit my listening. I know this works well because the French mini stories that I used to listen to when I first started learning French are 10x easier now than before and I’ve mainly focused on reading since last listening to them.
I see this process like overlapping circles (Venn diagram). Reading is the biggest circle and contains the knowledge of the word and the grammar. Listening overlaps with the reading circle since you need to know what the words mean, but it also has an additional part which is the ability to convert sounds into known words at full spoken speed. Speaking overlaps with both reading and listening, but then has an additional part for being able to produce the correct words and grammar by yourself. It’s like a series of waterfalls starting with reading that feeds into listening and then feeds into speaking. That’s why I choose to learn this way.
@aronald:
There is no “reply” so I’m “replying” to myself.
First. Thank you for the detailed and comprehensive response. I think we’re mostly on the same page.
“The catch is that I think it’s easier to digest information and learn vocab through reading rather than listening because you can control the speed and click on words for definition.”
^^^ I actually kind of agree with this, except I have co-opted this for audio. I don’t use the click-and-listen by reading and clicking just on the words. In fact I click on every single word to hear them spoken out loud. It’s way slower than reading but it’s a purely audio focus which is what I’m interested in. I think in fact, the ability to “click” on words is one of IMO lingQ’s killer features. (The other being the ability to see visually immediately which words in a given text are “unknown” so you can focus just on them.
Anyway, again thank you for the long detailed response once more. I need to read through and consider.
Makes sense. For me, it just seems like a massive number of words. Consider: 1M words in a year is roughly 100,000 per month which is roughly 3,000 words per day. Is that something like 2 hours reading per day? I don’t know.
Conversely, for an hour and a half of watching youtube and 30 minutes of anki per day I reckon for sure I could do 7,500 words of audio vocabulary in a year.
My guess:
At the end of that year, the reading only person would likely have way better grammar, but would understand nothing of listening at all. I suspect they would be able to speak decent grammar but have a horrible (perhaps unintelligible accent).
The listening and anki person would be able to understand at least mid intermediate and maybe high intermediate and be able to speak with a very good accent but probably have horrible grammar. They would likely be poor at reading or entirely illiterate.
That is for the extremes, though. Neither of us is doing the extremes. I’m doing some reading and some grammar and you’re doing some listening.
I think ultimately likely what it comes down to is what you want to focus on first. 3M words of reading I suspect takes at least 3 years and I would expect to be a rockstar after 3M words.
My method I would also expect to be a listening rockstar after three years (probably earlier). I don’t know, however, if somehow by magic, perfect grammar would be acquired just by listening. It would be an interesting experiment.
Anyhow, good discussion. Thanks.