How to Find the Best Methods to Learn to Read Foreign Languages
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- Опубліковано 12 чер 2024
- What are the best types of methods to use to learn foreign languages if your primary goal is to read literature in them? Books! Older books tend to have more substantial content, often aim at literature, and provide a measure of digital detox when using them. This video continues the conversation from last week by recommending materials for the 10 or so languages discussed. We then go into what other languages someone with the interests of this "proxy student" might eventually want to explore, particularly those (Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese) that serve as etymological sources for the majority of the world's languages.
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Join me at any time in my virtual academy to get a systematic theoretical framework for planning your long-term language learning in the Path of the Polyglot, to read and discuss Great Books of Western Civilization or the Comparative History of Religions in English (suitable for advanced non-natives as well as native speakers), to read and discuss French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish literature, to learn to read sacred languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, or Old Norse, or to develop not only literary but conversational abilities in Latin, plus more at : www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: www.alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
I'm also one who loves reading books. I spend so much time on screens that books give me an escape from them. Also, they feel like a little space to focus---you literally have to focus in one small space to read a book, and so the feeling is so different. Great video!
Thank you for substantiating my observations.
Excellent video as always.
Thank you kindly.
Thank you both once again for this discussion! Will be curious to see how this fellow goes through this plan!
12:35 Have to point out: the etymology of chemistry is not clear, but regardless of viewpoint, Arabic would only play the role of an intermediary language, not the language of origin for the word. The Arabic al-khimiya3 is itself loaned from either Greek "χυμείᾱ" (metallurgy) or from one of the names of the land of Egypt, "Χημ" (black, like its fertile soil), as alchemy was once said to have been invented by Hermes Trismegistos, a supposedly Egyptian mysticist.
Hello Yan, and thanks for the additional etymological information.
Another great video. I would love to hear more about how Arabic, Korean, etc. take so much more time to get as comfortable with as a European language.
Thanks for the suggestion. As noted in the introductions here, this may be a new format for a while, so if you can think of a set of questions to ask about that, my "proxy" can pose them for you and I will answer.
I just wanted to say that you have a wonderful channel here❤️, and you’re a very inspirational man❤️
Thank you very much for your kind words. If they are true, then I am achieving my goal. Thank you for letting me know!
My goals for the next 5 years are :
Italian
German
Russian
No particular order
My native language is Spanish
I might add Japanese sometime in the next 3 years once I feel I have a good grasp at Russian
If you seriously have polyitis and you dedicate yourself to this and work systematically, then this is doable. Best of success to you!
Thank you. When I get to Greek someday, I will definitely look into Die griechische Literatur in Text und Darstellung!
Enjoy it when you do!
Thank you for such a wonderful video. You sort of answered a comment I posted on the previous video here. But I am wondering what your thoughts are on studying both Ancient and Modern Greek simultaneously. Will it lead to confusion? Should I stick to one for now?
Thanks for the prompting question. This issue comes up often enough to be addressed in detail. It is a conceptual issue. Have you tried and found that you do confuse them, or are you just afraid that this might be the case? There is no reason for it to be a problem if you conceive of diachronic learning in the right way.
@@ProfASAr I haven't started learning Modern yet, so it's more of a fear than an actuality. I think I will give it a shot though, if you think it will be profitable. I would like to learn MG long term anyway. I have considered putting my 7 months of AG (Athenaze Vol I) to the side to focus on MG for the next 7 months, where after that I hopefully will have the opportunity to study AG in my final year at university. But doing a small sandwich of MG doesn't sound ideal, and I currently get 3 hours a week of living AG classes which I don't want to give up. So my options seem to be: to stick out AG for another year and a half, or to do both AG and MG at the same time.
@@jonathanwalters8702 I would never recommend this out of the blue to someone who wasn't already thinking about it, but since you are, I do believe you can get much more out of Greek by studying it as a diachronic whole. Of course, speaking like Plato to your taxi driver won't get you anywhere fast, and if modern Greek forms intrude themselves into an Attic exam paper and therefore lower your grade, then you will want to avoid this. However, barring these kinds of scenarios, if you can consciously note the difference between different eras, then it provides a context that makes overall retention and progress all the easier.
@@ProfASAr Thank you for a quick response! I shall order the Cortina course with haste!
Hey, I have significant experience in Latin using the LLPSI series. It has been a while since I studied Latin actively, though. But I'd love to go through the series again to refresh my memory. If the guy in the video would like a study buddy or perhaps a tutor (depending on how skill levels compare), I'd be down to talk!
Thanks for the kind offer! I know he is both continuing Latin in his university and with me in the academy, where we are moving on to other "natural methods" as well as LLPSI readers.
@@ProfASAr Personally, I have read all of the LLPSI readers (except for one or two) and have read a dozen or so libri from various authors (mostly Cicero, Vergil, Caesar and Livy). I haven't interacted with Latin much the past 4 years or so, but I would love to be able to share my recently renewed interest in Latin with someone independently of their skill level. I'm 26 right now.
If you would be willing to share my contact information with him, would you know a good place to hand it over to you so it doesn't get leaked? (I do not trust the youtube comment section :D)
@@CulusMagnus Write to me through my website and I will pass your contact information on to Laban.
Languages in which I have read at least one literary work(one example each):
English (About 10 Agatha Christie's books), Portuguese (Machado de Assis novels), French (Les miserables), Spanish (La colmena), Italian (a few detective novels), Catalan (Dozens of short stories by Quim Monzò and Pere Calders) and Neapolitan (Filumena Marturano, a theater play).
Languages in which I want to read at least a couple of books, and which I may not have a hard time doing so: Sicilian (theater plays) and Galician (BR Portuguese native speaker)
Languages I'll have to learn to be able to read in the original and which will take time to learn: Russian. Actually, that's just one language.
The same, but which will take less time to learn: German, Dutch and Norwegian. German currently at A1 level.
Languages that I want to be able to speak and understand to an intermediate level, but that I currently gave up even dreaming to able to read works in the original: Japanese, Persian, Bengali, Turkish.
And there are those I want to learn enough so as they stop being noise to me: Korean, Polish, Hindi, Swahili, Lingala (beautiful noise btw) and others.
Thank you for sharing. It sounds as if you have the Romance family down. Congratulations! And you've begun on Germanic, so here is wishing you insight as you work on another branch. That leaves Russian your other "exotics," and you've got a wonderful list of interests here as well. I hope you will be happily surprised to find some day that, for example, it is not more difficult to read Persian than it is to learn to speak and understand it to an intermediate level.
Thank you very much for your recommendations, valuable information and guidance for me. In ancient literature it is mentioned about "Memory Palaces". Can you recommend literature on developing and improving one's own memory? On the example of Dominic O'Brien it is possible to be convinced of the effectiveness of such trainings.
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence.
@@ProfASAr Thanks a lot!
This book also mentions the rhetoric textbook that Mateo Ricci himself studied from. "The De arte rhetorica 1568 by Cypriano Soarez, SJ"
Interesting discussion. With an abundance of internet polyglots and second language learners of the Asian languages deemed difficult for English speakers, how do you reconcile the claims that self-taught and homemade immersion can generate fluency within a year or 2 of studying 4 or more hours per day?
I am sorry but I can't follow you. Please rephrase.
4 hours a day over a period of 2 years amount to over 1400 hours. 8 semesters of learning a language in group classes would usually take less than 500 hours in total, with time for homework included. More 900 hours of imput left. Let's take movies as an example. With 900 hours you can watch about 500 movies. So, 1400 hours should be enough to become a good conversationalist and a good listener with a few thousands of words under your belt. But reading literature is a whole different animal, you need words and then more words, and there are idioms upon idioms, words that change meaning over time, phrasing. After 1400 hours of study of a hard language you should be able to open a book and start reading it. You probably would enjoy it though, as you would have to look up words in the dictionary every 5 or 10 words. Ihave never studied a hard language, as they call them, but I will give one example from a language I have studied, Italian. While everyday Italian poses little to no problem to me, be in its spoken be on its written form, even thriller books have me looking up the meaning of a word every two or thee sentences. Sometimes a few sentences with no need to look up a word, sometimes 4 or 5 words in only two sentences. So, reading in Italian for me is simultaneously fun and annoying.
I have no experience with Asian languges, but for Italian I can confirm that self-taught immersion and reading of approx. 1-2 hrs/day can lead to fluency within 2 years. I successfully passed an italian B2 exam of the University of Perugia after 2 years, and now after 4 years I've started to make booktube videos in Italian. I would add talking to yourself as an additional feature (can be annoying to your household members though 😅, but you can also shift between actually speaking and silent inner monologue, just try to describe everything you're doing even if it ist just brushing your teeth or ironing your pants... doesn't take any additional time, - take mental notes of missing words and dedicate 10 minutes per day to look them up in a dictionary, or do it right away online using your mobile phone. And as Prof Arguelles points out, this is a transferable skill. With my latest language Yiddish it took me just 1 year to reach that stage.
@@polyglotreading That was helpful as I'm learning Italian. I need to get back to 1 solid and perhaps 2 hours broken into segments.
@@YogaBlissDance I managed to get to 2 hours daily by using lots of 'dead times', e.g. when commuting or being at the gym or doing gardening. These time slots are perfect for listening to podcasts or watching youtube videos in your target language, on topics that you're anyway interested in (your favorite hobbies etc). That gives a lot of daily immersion time with fun and without additional time needed. So you use the same time slot threefold: you're doing physical exercise, broaden your knowledge on interesting topics, and on top of that you've language immersion.
I'd love to be able to speak Tocharian B. Just a dream.
Alas I do not even have any resources for that.
Audio
???