Language Learning Consultation - Lucas
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- Опубліковано 26 кві 2024
- A consultation with an advanced learner regarding 1) active vs. passive studying; 2) input vs. output using textbook dialogues; 3) phonetic awareness while shadowing; and 4) approach to vocabulary acquisition. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ne... Join my academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac...
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Thanks for having me on Professor Arguelles! I hope the conversation was productive and enlightening for others as well regarding making the most out of textbook study. Happy studying everyone!
Writing lists on paper folded into columns (from the day's readings or text chapters) are great for new words; my fastest acquisition technique. You can't review too effectively, however, so they are really only helpful for a few days.
Small paper flashcards are great for vocabulary acquisition as a second step, as you can change the order and classify by ease. Making the cards is fun and with concentration a big part of learning. In Japan for daily school quizzes, I could make paper cards and memorize 20 Japanese words at the N2 level (kanji writing, kana writing, recognition, English meanings) in less than an hour.
SRS is terrible for new vocab acquisitions but can be good for reviewing old vocab. You can have example sentences, audio, etc. But the SuperMemo guy recommends simple. The context sentences are nice but maybe provide too much information.
Frankly, living in a country for natural SRS review from daily reading and conversations is best. . .
@@dosgos Some great points! I've not messed around with paper lists too much as I find them a bit tedious, but have heard frequently of the efficacy in such techniques as Iversen or Gold lists.
I will however disagree slightly regarding SRS use in acquiring new vocab. I think anything can used effectively as long as sufficient learning context is provided; in my instance, I was able to learn ~7k japanese words in just one year creating anki flashcards and found my review of them to be salient and useful!
I highly recommend learning the most alpha languages ever created Norse and Gothic and Icelandic and the other prettiest languages Faroese / Dutch / Norwegian / Welsh / Breton / Cornish which are as pretty as English, as these are the prettiest and most refined and most poetic and most modern and coolest languages with the best letter combinations and the most gorgeous word endings and the coolest sound patterns / sounds / pronunciation rules etc and the most pretty / well-constructed words as well as the most words that are pretty (they have almost only super pretty words, for example, Norse and Icelandic have only or almost only pretty words, like, I haven’t even come across a Norse word that is truly non-pretty or embarrassingly funny that I would be embarrassed to say yet, Norse being one of the most perfect languages that’s perfect or almost perfect, and one of the greatest works of art of all time) and that also have the most organized and professional aspect, so they are the languages that truly dsv the attention that are a must-know for every learner, one really wouldn’t want not to know these languages as they are just so gorgeous and the languages that are truly fun to learn and speak and hear and see etc, plus they are all easy category 1 languages, as are all other Germanic languages and Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Manx, so, I would recommend learning them all 2gether, instead of trying to learn non-pretty languages such as Japanese and Mongolian and most other languages that exist that only have a few pretty words and mostly non-pretty words and that don’t sound refined / good and that are also unnecessarily complicated category 4 to category 10 languages, and, I would recommend learning Hungarian instead of Turkish as Hungarian is like the pretty version of Turkish, having all the good parts that certain Turkish words would have, but without the parts that aren’t good, as Hungarian has more than 90% words that are pretty, whereas Turkish has too many words with letters combinations that aren’t good, and even its aspect doesn’t look refined, unlike the aspect of Hungarian which looks very refined and almost as refined as that of a Germanic language and that is an easy mid category 2 language!
By the way, there are about fifty to maybe one hundred pretty languages (pretty languages are languages with mostly or almost only pretty words aka words that have good or great letter combinations, which are combinations of letters that go well together, and pretty word endings, and pretty sounds etc, which create pretty sound patterns and pretty aspects that sound and look gorgeous and professional and serious etc) and I have more than fifty of them on my list of languages I want to know and improve (the ones that I already know of) and am learning at least twenty-five to thirty of them at the moment, and prioritizing mostly the prettiest languages, so I would recommend that all learners do the same, as learning pretty languages that are naturally easy (because pretty words are naturally easy to memorize and learn, so pretty words from pretty languages require way less repetition to become permanent, plus pretty languages are naturally motivating, so one feels motivated to keep learning and to keep discovering new words, as pretty words bring true joy to the eye / ear) and, they are all category one languages, with only a few of my target languages being category two, and Irish / Gaelic which have a category three spelling tho they are very easy to memorize, so one can learn many of the pretty and easy languages at the same time and get fluent in most of the ones that are prioritized the most in a few years, whereas non-pretty languages are naturally very complicated and not easy to learn and many of them are impossible category ten languages such as Japanese and Chinese (that even natives cannot learn truly fluently and can only use about three to five thousand characters, even though they have many tens of thousands of characters) that cannot be learnt fluently, but pretty languages can be learnt to true fluency and even to a writer level which is over thirty thousand base words known automatically!
The pretty languages are all a great option, with the prettiest languages Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / English / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish (which are all Norse languages and languages that come mostly from Norse or that were influenced by Norse the most, including English which is mostly a Norse language) being the best options that should be prioritized the most, and, the pretty languages include all Norse / Germanic languages, including the ones that haven’t been officially recognized as a language yet tho they are different languages with different spelling and not dialects (such as all the Norwegian-based languages and all the Danish-based languages and all the Norse-based languages and all the German-based languages and all the Dutch-based languages and Elfdalian etc) and Forn Svenska and Óld English and Proto Germanic and Middle English etc and the Frisian languages as well as the other ancient Germanic languages, and Modern Welsh / Modern Breton / Modern Cornish / Modern Manx / Modern Irish / Modern Gaelic aka the modern Celtic languages (and maybe even Gaulish which is kinda half-Celtic / half-Latin and seems to have over eighty percent pretty words, from what I have seen so far) as well as their Óld versions and their Middle versions, Germanic languages and Celtic languages being the prettiest languages, and also, the Latin languages Latin / Galician / Portuguese / Gallo / Ladin(o) / Guernsey / Pretarolo / Catalan / Friulian / Occitan / Sardinian / Esperanto / Sicilian / French / Spanish / Italian / Neapolitan / Venetian / Walloon / Interlingua / Corsican, and Hungarian, and also Slovene and Latvian which are the pretty Slavic languages, and a few other languages such as Finnish and Estonian which are also mostly pretty!
@@FrozenMermaid666 a very strange and subjective write up
Some fun sentences in the heavenly languages Norse and Icelandic are...
Ek heiti Freyja ok ek em at læra Norrænu því ek elski (elska) hana! (Norse)
Hann ǫrninn vissi ekki hvaðan kemr Sólin... (Norse)
Ek veit alt er þú veizt ekki! (Norse)
Ég hef talað Ensku síðan þegar ég vas (var) tveggja eða triggja ára!
En ég get líka talað Hollensku og Norsku og Spænsku og FornNorrænu!
Ég get talað Íslensku reiprennandi og ég em (er) ekki með neina hreim!
Ef ég gæti lært annað mál, hvað væri það? Það væri auðvitað Danska!
Ég em (er) að hugsa að það er mikilvægt að læra að minnsta kosti eitt erlent tungumál, eða flest fallegu tungumálin!
Svo ég valdi Íslensku og ég héld áfram að læra hana...
Ég læri það í samhengi... (Icelandic)
Hvíslaðu að svaninum!
En ertu frá hinum hlutanum?
Þegar ég segi Ísland, hvað er það fyrsta sem dettur þér í (hug) hugi?
Als ik Ijsland zeg, wat is het eerste wat naar boven komt bij jou? (Dutch)
Some of the prettiest words in Gothic are namo, þein, hunds, þatist, ik, weis, eis, qen, driusaima, wairþan, ains, sinteina, nist, imma, twais, eisarn, swikn, uhteigo, brunna, faíraþro etc!
(The words in these heavenly languages are just so pretty and so poetic and so cool, they are true works of art, so I definitely wish I had learnt them in childhood, and I highly recommend learning them all together, as they are way too pretty not to know and so magical!)
Join my virtual academy and meet with me every week to get a systematic theoretical framework for long-term language learning in the Path of the Polyglot: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ Join also to read and discuss French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish literature, to learn sacred languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, or Old Norse, to develop conversational abilities in Latin, and/or to read and discuss Great Books of Western Civilization or the Comparative History of Religions in English. And subscribe to my monthly newsletter at: www.alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
Thank you Lucas and Professor for this lovely discussion!
Very interesting question about vocab - that's really the most difficult part about any language, and my experience has been that sometimes I can acquire vocabulary from lots of exposure, and then other times it just doesn't work. For instance, I am currently studying Hebrew by reading the OT with an interlinear translation, and I notice myself gradually being able to retain and recognise more and more words without having to look at the translation. It probably helps that so many words and formulas are very repetitive lol. When I look at an entirely different book it's much harder to understand anything. Point is - learning through exposure works well here, as it has for many other languages, particularly Indo-European ones - English, Norwegian, Latin, etc.
With others the path is much more difficult and thorny, and eventually I gave up trying to learn new things, which was the case with Japanese, for instance, where I got to a certain vocab size and sorta stopped picking up wholly new things, and the same happened with Hungarian, although there I did not get to as high of a level, and with Scottish Gaelic. Now I really like all those languages, but it's just something about their vocab that doesn't quite click with me and I end up not acquiring it as efficiently
Also that feeling you mentioned with Mongolian words not feeling like proper words - I had that exact same feeling with Hebrew when I was starting out! But now I have a proper feel for Hebrew words and they feel homey in a way.
I wholeheartedly agree, I had a similar experience with Japanese words being very difficult to remember and acquire. It probably wasn't until I knew around 6k words that they stopped giving me such a headache. It seems that there really is no magic key when it comes to vocab acquisition, but maybe we find certain sound patterns and language systems more amenable to study. Japanese has always sounded nice to my ear, so learning new words was always intriguing even if I couldn't properly retain them. Mongolian's phonology on the other hand is much more complex and less intuitive, making it hard to distinguish between sounds in new words. But I do hope that eventually things will fall into place.
As to your first point--I really do find the question of vocab acquisition to be thought provoking. I have never had to study vocab in German and French, but perhaps because I learned them much more naturally through school courses, university, and spending time in the country. I have always been able to pick up vocab in those languages rather painlessly. On the other hand, I feel as if Japanese and Mongolian are impenetrable without dedicated vocab study. I wonder if this might just be the kind of intuitiveness of closely related languages.
@@lepleuth2643 yeah maybe you do have to put more emphasis on vocab with these langs. That’s the toughest part of any language though!
Thanks for starting the discussion, Yan.
I like to learn vocabulary along with alphabet, pronunciation, immersion, and grammar. The tedium comes from random vocabulary. Instead, I use a list of the most-used words in language. It varies among languages, but still useful to me. When I read or try to form a sentence, my biggest struggle is thinking of nouns and verbs, more than grammatical and general sentence structure. But the most-used words pop up very efficaciously in conversation or presentation. I believe it also depends on the learning style of the student. I can learn 50-100 words a day to the point that I can recite them back (but they fall off quickly if I don't use them or review them), so I may be in a rare learning method category.
Thanks for the substantive comment.
For very difficult languages I find resources with more extensive dialogs at each level are invaluable. Often I use the FSI courses with the pauses removed and all the additional sentences from the drills help a lot of things click better. Don’t know what would be available for Mongolian though.
Thanks for recommending a good way to use FSI.
He seems to already know several languages and seems to thoroughly learn them. If he doesn't do this already, he could skip a hard grammar point for the day, and go back to it a few days later or a week later. Sometimes, there's a grammar point you just can't understand. You give up understanding it for the time being. You go back to it some time later, and it seems so logical and easy.
He seems to compare himself only with the fluent speaker he wants to be. Doing that can be too hard on oneself. Once every month, he should look back and compare him with the speaker he was a month before. If you only compare yourself with the ideal you, you'll always be dissatisfied and feel you're not making progress.
Some great advice! Grammar can definitely be challenging, I had to learn the hard way to let some concepts take their time to sink in such as as Japanese's わけ and という. I think your second point is even more potent: it's very easy to become obsessive over comparing oneself to native speakers, whose inconceiveably large number of contact hours with the langugae can make even 10,000 hours look paltry in comparison. I agree--It's great to keep in mind that we can be our own greatest enemies!
Thanks for the discussion.
How is it you have a polyglot course with no videos of you speaking any languages?
He does
Thanks for responding.
Some degree of "gibberish" at first while shadowing is inevitable. You have to trust the process of continual improvement. It's inevitable that improvement will take place if you are shadowing the same audio materials repetivitely.
Thanks, Liam!
Yooo when did PPMD start learning mongolian?
???
한국어로 산스크리트어를 가르쳐준다고 했으면 당장 결제했다.
가능해요!
Mongolian is the best
Enjoy!
The first question lasted 6 minutes!
I didn't want it to be too vague 😅 it could have definitely been shorter though!
Thank you both.