| ▲ | Rendello 5 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970): > I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself. > What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context. > Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle. I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | robocat 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills. My personal working theory: Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write. From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes. Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake. Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult. The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words. I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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