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Grüß dich! (2)
Ich bin nicht ein gold-member. Ich brauche Deutsch hilfen! Ich kann Englisch hilfen. Hilfen mir Bitte!
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Language pair: English; German
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Kevin
May 15, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Grüß dich!
I live in the USA. I would like to learn German. I'm barely intermediate. I would be happy to help with your English.
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Language pair: English; German
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Kevin
May 15, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: May 21, 2005
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Michael M.
May 9, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Language learning method: Part V of V
But I'll tell you the resources I use most often in my studying of Spanish:
1) Formal lessons: I've been fortunate to be able to find some wonderful free on-line courses that give wonderful information on dialogues, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and so on. Everything I need to put into my brain in the way of knowledge.
2) Good dictionaries: I have a number of resources I use to help me learn unfamiliar words or to find words I don't know how to say. I have a couple on-line as well as several paper dictionaries. These include dictionaries bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of the Spanish language, and dictionaries that cover street slang and idioms.
3) MLE: This site helps me get into contact with people I can correspond with in the language I'm trying to learn, and who can give me a native speaker's feedback on how I'm doing.
4) DVD movies on my DVD player. I'm always looking for movies I would like to see that I can play back either with Spanish Audio, with Spanish subtitles, or, preferably, both. This can, of course, be done with movies in Cantonese as well, but you have to know where to buy movies that can be played in Cantonese. Even with a VCR, there are movies you can buy that play Cantonese audio or Chinese subtitles.
5) Books (novels and such) in Spanish. I have a variety of different kinds of books in Spanish. I started with some of my most beloved children's books my parents read me when I was a twerp. I worked my way up through the Harry Potter books to things like Shakespeare's plays and the Poem of El Cid. I read Spanish books translated from the English as well as books originally written in Spanish. I take advantage of books I find in Spanish that I am familiar with in English, as this also makes the more challenging material more accessible to me while I'm developing my skill. Now I'm to the point where I'm not afraid to pick up anything written in Spanish. All I need is a good dictionary, and I’m good to go.
My biggest weakness is that I don't get nearly enough face-to-face practice communicating orally in Spanish. It will always be physically difficult for me to converse in Spanish until I get the opportunity to really practice and develop the neural pathways in my brain to carry out those skills. I'm working on it. In the mean time, the DVD's, Spanish VHS, the Spanish radio station, anything I can do on the Internet is all effort well spent. We just do the best we can with what we've got to work with.
I'm hoping I may have answered some useful questions here, whether or not they are questions you will have thought to ask. Please let me know if I can offer any further help.
Have fun!
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA, USA
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 11, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Language learning method: Part IV of V
You will want to control the quantity of material that you're working with at any given time. Four lines of dialogue, perhaps, three to five new vocabulary words. One grammar rule. You'll develop a sense of how much you can comfortably work with in one session, and how quickly you are able to absorb new material at various quantities. Obviously, the more you study, the more you'll learn, at the lower end of the spectrum. But once you cross the capacity of your mind to work with new material, that will drop off really sharply. Suddenly you'll find that the more words you add, the less you retain. It's not hard at all to study so much in a session that you don't learn anything at all. Keep your volume down low where you can see fairly consistent progress most of the time. Of course you'll have bad days where it feels like the lights are on and nobody's home, and you wonder why you even bother. But those should be the exception and not the rule.
Your familiarity with the material, too, will have a huge impact on how much you can put into a lesson. You can handle a whole lot more in a review study than you can when all of the material is brand new. This is something you'll get a feel for as you go.
I have been spending most of my time studying Spanish, which is among the more popular languages to study, and has tons of support available. I have been finding amazing resources on the net to help me improve my Spanish. Cantonese is not so easy to work with. It's not even as widely spoken as Mandarin, and I have great difficulties finding good resources for Mandarin on-line. Mostly, I get the best support out of the textbooks I used when I studied Mandarin in College. The best suggestion I can offer is search ye the web and see what you can find. I've never studied Cantonese, so I know nothing. Perhaps there will be others on MLE who have some knowledge there.
Continued: See Part V of V
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 11, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Language learning method: Part III of V
I just measure my fluency in terms of how often the words I don't know in what I'm reading interfere with my ability to get the point of the reading. A lot of words I can work around—figuring them out from the context, or getting enough information around them, that I'm not concerned about what they mean exactly. I might notice, for example, that a strange word seems to be the name of the color, and decided that I really don't care what color it is—it may not be important to the reading.
The actual practical experience with the reading, writing, speaking, and listening must be the foundation of your study. After all, that is, I assume, your purpose in learning the language—developing the ability to communicate orally and in writing (people often skip the reading and writing, or just the writing, if those skills aren't important to them. It makes sense to me). But all of the grammar drills and vocabulary work in the world will be of no help to you at all if you don't practice putting those vocabulary words into grammatically correct sentences (or taking them out of them, if you're listening or reading). It's like reading a book on how to ride a bike and expecting to be able to ride the bike. It just won't happen until you get through the practice and laying down those new neural pathways in your brain.
There's a lot of controversy in education these days about whether grammar drills even accomplish anything useful for students who want to write well (and I would imagine the same would apply to learning to speak well). There are a number of very smart people writing very well-researched articles that argue that teaching grammar is a complete waste of time. I've read a few of these, but I've never been convinced. Mostly because I find that having a sound knowledge of grammar really helps me. I think it's because of the incredible synthesizing abilities of the brain. It can pull information together and make the most incredible intuitive connections. For example, are you aware that nobody has ever been able to program a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a Chihuahua? They look too similar, and there is no way to specifically identify the visual characteristics that differentiate the two. Yet for the human brain, this is a very simple task—a "no-brainer". We don't even think about it. It seems so obvious to us. Still, we can't identify the process that makes this so simple.
I think there is something similar going on with the grammar. Knowing the rules and practicing their application supports and reinforces (in my humble opinion) the learning process that occurs through practice. I may be full of baloney, but that's my opinion, for what it's worth.
Continued: See Part IV of V
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 11, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Language Learning method: Part II of V
So practice whichever of the four parts matter to you, of the listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Practice regularly, and often. Spending long hours at it is not nearly as important as practicing regularly and frequently. Your way better off practicing for fifteen minutes twice a day six days a week than trying to practice for five hours once a week. If you've ever done any body building, you may know that the body needs to have a good workout to challenge the limits of your strength and endurance, and then it needs to have a period of rest in order to recover and build new muscle tissue.
Your brain is a lot like that. Give yourself a minimum of two hours rest breaks between practice periods so that you're brain has a chance to process new skills and to relax a little. Just as body builders alternate their routines, working chest and arms on Monday and Wednesday, legs and stomach on Tuesday and Thursday, you may want to rotate your practice, too. Perhaps, working on reading and writing on MW, and listening and speaking on Tue Th. Maybe you want to Read Monday, Write, Tuesday, Listen Wednesday, and speak on Thursday. Whatever you do, make sure to give yourself short periods of regular practice, rotate your skills so as to keep them all sharp and also give each one plenty of rest break time. But don't work past your brain's capacity to integrate new material. Not only will you lose the extra material you're trying to cram in, but you're likely also to lose the materially you studied at first as well.
The bottom line is, work smart, not hard. Don’t try to memorize the dictionary starting from A. Try to get your hands on any kind of good textbook because they always start you off with all of the most useful words. Verbs like, to be, to talk, to stop, to buy, to stay. Nouns like name, chair, pen, telephone. All of the basic adjectives and adverbs, prepositions—the words you need for every day conversation. You're not going to have a lot of need for the verb to transubstantiate, the noun catafalque, or the adjective picaresque. It's pretty easy to find a book of the 1000 most useful words in any language you want to study, at least for the more widely spoken languages – maybe not for Taiwanese, for example. But certainly for Mandarin, for most of the European languages, for Japanese. Tagalog, etc. I would expect that you should be able to find something like that for Cantonese. Get those down, and you are ready to take on about 65% of the language. Your effort / return ratio will drop off fairly consistently after that. Every time you add another 1000 words to your vocabulary, it tacks on a smaller increment to the percentage of the language you have mastered, until you get in the high nineties, and the impact of adding another thousand words is hardly noticeable in terms of your fluency in the language.
Continued: See Part III of V
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 11, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Language Learning method: Part I of V
I recently sent the following message to a friend who said he found it helpful. So I'm posting it here in case any of you might get anything out of it.
Learning languages is great fun, and it does take quite a bit of work. I find it most rewarding if I can keep up with it regularly every day, or at least several times a week. Less often than that, and you're usually not going to make much progress forward.
But learning to speak a language is a huge task to take on. In order to be fluent, you need a vocabulary in the tens of thousands of words, you've got these volumes of grammar rules to learn, and literally thousands of hours of practice, both alone, and in conversation with other speakers in order to develop some facility with the language. Maybe it sounds like I'm trying to discourage you here—I’m sure this all sounds discouraging. But I swear that's not my point. My point is, you have to have a realistic view of what you're up to in order to really take it on.
Maybe you've heard the one about how you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. That's how I deal with this huge project of learning to speak a foreign language.
On one level, I divide the job up into functional parts: I need to learn vocabulary, grammar, and dialogue phrases. I also break it down into skills: I need to develop my ability to speak, to hear, to read, and to write. Each of these shifts the focus a little, and each has special considerations. It seems like it ought to be easy, you learn how to say a word right, you should have no trouble catching it when you hear it. And it does help, but the problem is, we often forget that any skill that involves physical muscles has two parts to it—the knowledge and the execution. The knowledge takes just a minute or so – we memorize the definition or the grammar rule. But then the first time we have to use it in a conversation, we do it wrong. And not just once, but time and time again, over and over. A lot of us get really impatient about that, thinking we're being stupid, hitting ourselves in the head. But there's nothing wrong with all those repeated mistakes. It's just our normal learning process. You had to fall on your butt a few times to learn to walk, to ride a bike, and you'll have to mix up your measure words, or choose the wrong prepositions a huge number of times before your brain forges the proper connections so that you can do it smoothly and easily. All it take is the willingness to be wrong a whole lot of times until you can get it right.
I don't know where you are with the Chinese writing, but if you read and write Mandarin traditional characters, you should have little trouble reading Cantonese. You will mostly need to concentrate on speaking and listening. But I'm sure you'll already know that.
Continued: See Part II of V
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 11, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:need help with mandarin
Hi,
I am from Bejing, capital of China, Chinese is my native language. I live in New York. I need to improve my English listening and speaking. Where do you come from? where do you live now?
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Language pair: English; Chinese, Mandarin
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Jenny Y.
April 8, 2005
# Msgs: 4
Latest: May 25, 2005
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Re:need help with mandarin
Hi,
I am from Bejing, capital of China, Chinese is my native language. I live in New York. I need to improve my English listening and speaking. Where do you come from? where do you live now?
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Language pair: English; Chinese, Mandarin
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Jenny Y.
April 8, 2005
# Msgs: 4
Latest: May 25, 2005
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