@ Steve - I’m not surprised by your first sentence, but I am surprised by your last sentence. I remember reading your description of how you use lingQ, saying you listen to the audio first. For me, that would mean listening was a higher priority for that lesson. Did I miss something?
Well I don’t expect to win this fight on a forum for a website about reading and listening so I won’t even try. Non-programmers will never understand our constant obsession with being precise. I would rather be precise in my German than “okay and conversational”
I also know that bad habits are extremely hard to break. People who have self-learned an instrument will know what I’m talking about.
If you turn exercises into a challenge they’re not that bad and they’re pretty good at dramatically improving your grammar. One of the top language apps in the iOS store does exactly this.
There is some mixture to reading, listening, writing, grammar study, and speaking. I don’t think anyone knows conclusively what the most effective mix is. But for a few months, my mixture is more grammar study and less reading. Then I imagine I’ll flip them around and attack from the other direction.
Edit 1: Wow can’t believe I missed this sentence “We read and listen to languages for pleasure.” Yeah, that’s my problem. I’ll never read German for pleasure. Everything I want to read is in English and I can absorb much much faster than if it were in English. Now, I might actually watch German history documentaries. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
Something like - YouTube
That’s interesting to me
So if there’s nothing I want to read, then reading is just as boring as exercises
The reason I didn’t learn French in school was because I knew I was never going to France. Plus I didn’t give a damn about history or social science - so I only retained information I thought I would need and care about… that pretty much just means I remember Calculus. The rest of my schooling was a complete was of my time.
Funny thing is… fast forward 10-15 years. I have now been to France, I’m interested in politics, and history is my constant obsession.
Well, I understand your programming analogy but I think there´s one problem…
Programming seems to be logical and precise, with set rules - languages are (in general) unlogical, unprecise and most grammar rules are treated like “non binding suggestions” in real life. ^^ The good news is, that people can understand even things like “me food eaten wants!” while in programming it´s more like “you forgot a semikolon, I can´t compile that shit!”
I´m not saying that you should ignore grammar, all I´m sayin´ is that languages are more “relaxed”.^^
@Spatterson
“I also know that bad habits are extremely hard to break. People who have self-learned an instrument will know what I’m talking about.”
I taught myself bass, then studied it at the university level.
It was not exactly ‘hard’ to break the bad habits, it just took being aware of them. I find that things go exactly the same way in language learning. In music school my professor made me aware of my mistakes. In language learning the grammar books and my native speaker friends do.
It seems I am not in the mood to argue tonight. Learn the way you guys find effective.
@djvlbass “It was not exactly ‘hard’ to break the bad habits, it just took being aware of them.”
I know nothing about instruments, other than the old roses on your piano joke, but I do know that for me being aware of a bad habit is just the very beginning of fixing it. I have to side with spatterson on this.
@Wulfgar, Spatterson
Maybe learning music before I got into languages helped me to learn how to adapt to change easier. I do internalize things fairly quickly. This is probably what attracted me to the lingq method.
I find that the process starts by realizing an error, then ends by repeating the correction a couple times, at most. On bass, I would have fingerings wrong for entire passages of music. I’d just write out a correction and repeat it a bunch of times. I do the same thing with language phrases. For me it isn’t hard to think about the correct way to do it a couple times, then have it internalized.
“I’ll never read German for pleasure. Everything I want to read is in English”
I cannot imagine not being interested in reading in a language that I am learning. Learning about how and what people think is one of my major motivations in learning the language. If you don’t enjoy reading, you won’t do much of it. The massive input approach won’t work without massive input. To each his own.
I no longer buy into the idea that there is a best and most efficient way of learning a language. .
I’ll tell a story instead of arguing. And this time it’s about math, not computer science.
When I did my undergrad in CS I always went to class. I was religious in it. But I never wrote anything down. Ever. I always thought “I learn best by listening and then doing it on my own to figure it out” And this works quite well for me actually. Mathematical derivations in multivariate calculus is a good example. You can try and memorize a bunch of “formulas”… or you can start with the basics and derive them yourself – go reinvent the wheel. Well that was my bread and butter of my learning in college. But the most dramatic effect came my second semester freshman year. All the guys on my floor as Linear Algebra at 8am…all the way on the other side of campus. I was practically the only one there. No one on the floor was really concerned either because we were all students in an über-geeky, hardcore engineering school. Math was “easy”. Yeah that all changed when I made an “A” on the first test and everyone else didn’t. Still they continued to skip class… until about a week before the second test (of 6 tests). Then suddenly I was conned into being the hall’s linear algebra teacher. So instead of me sitting alone and working through the textbook I would pay attention in class, read a bit of the book after class, and that night go through and “teach” the other lazy bastards Linear Algebra. And the results (for me) were incredible. I made straight perfect on the remaining tests… and I was studying LESS. Purely the act of getting up at the whiteboard, making mistakes, correcting them, bouncing question off other people really sunk the material in. So I thought I was an audio learner… but I guess that makes me a kinesthetic learner? I don’t know if that applies to language learning but I do know it’s important for me to find what works for me. My first second language is the testbed. I bet Steve did the same thing and landed on reading.
“I find that the process starts by realizing an error, then ends by repeating the correction a couple times, at most. On bass, I would have fingerings wrong for entire passages of music. I’d just write out a correction and repeat it a bunch of times. I do the same thing with language phrases. For me it isn’t hard to think about the correct way to do it a couple times, then have it internalized.”
I’m not talking about this. This is like saying you always get the same sentence wrong every time. I’m talking about deep-down habits. How’s your wrist position on your fret hand? Where’s your thumb? Are you sitting up straight?
“I cannot imagine not being interested in reading in a language that I am learning. Learning about how and what people think is one of my major motivations in learning the language. If you don’t enjoy reading, you won’t do much of it. The massive input approach won’t work without massive input. To each his own.”
If you took Colin’s idea from another thread… and took a text and “removed” parts from it to make a “grammar exercise”… then you can do massive, active input. This is an area I will toy with